Changed Destines
by MysteryTrek
Summary: The Asteroid Crisis changed history, and the Fenton's fortunes forever. Now, as FentonWorks tech fuels our expansion into the rest of the solar system. An old enemy changes Danny's fate forever. And reveals a new enemy that will, once again, change humanity's future forever. Please read and review! Beta'd by ghostanimal. Edited for grammar and storyline changes.
1. Chapter 1

"The woes to come; the

children yet unborn

shall feel this day as sharp to them

as thorn."

- William Shakespeare, _Richard II _

Chapter One

Daniel moaned as what felt like a lance of pain burned through his skull. As he swam in the dark he felt his senses return, or at least he began to feel awareness of his body beyond his forehead. Unfortunately, that awareness took the form of a liquid fire flooding his veins. He heard a voice in the darkness, beyond the haze of pain.

_ Danny, _a familiar feminine voice sliced through the agony.

_Sam,_ the seventeen-year-old young man thought desperately. _No wait. There's something else about that voice. _He forced himself to move, and received added gut-wrenching pain for his trouble. _Never mind,_ he said mentally. _Leave me alone it hurts too much_

_Danny!_ That voice shouted again, more anxious now. _Shit. _He heard footsteps, footsteps that receded off into the distance.

_She's going away,_ he thought to himself. _Good, maybe she won't come back._ He sunk back into the suffocating dark, as the paralyzing pain raged on, as images dancing before his eyes. He remembered kissing Sam in his bed. Then his girlfriend's scream of surprise as powerful hands yanked him off her from behind. He heard the sound of battle as Sam threw herself at their attackers; he thrashed and struggled against his enemy when he felt the sharp sting of a needle piercing the flesh of his neck.

The sound of footsteps once again broke through his reverie. He struggled to move again, only to feel every muscle in his body seemingly spasm at once as water smashed into his face. Breathing in water, his eyes flew open in a panic as he coughed and blew the water out.

"Good," a voice he now recognized instantly said. "You're all right." He looked up, his eyes widening in shock as they took in Dani, a concerned look on her face. He could tell it was Dani. Despite the seeming impossibility of it, she was his clone, and possessed the same black hair and blue eyes. She was also, for lack of a better term, quite striking, something which even now threw him for a loop because he couldn't for the life of him figure out how he'd gotten her decidedly feminine looks from _his_ DNA. Putting She was at the tall end for a girl, the fifteen-year-old settling in at what would almost surely be her full height of around five feet eight inches, with figure that would've, if she'd been so inclined, guaranteed her a career as a model any day of the week f she'd been so inclined. A career, if he knew the young woman he thought of as his cousin at all, she manifestly wasn't inclined to take.

As it stood, however, she looked like she'd been going to the University of Hard Knocks. Her black hair was a tangled mess, her clothes ripped and torn in several places, were stained almost black with sweat, dirt and grime, all of which contributed to the foul smell radiating off her. Capping it off, there was a bruise purpling on her left cheek.

Not that any of it mattered of course, as he shot to his feet and gathered her into his arms, crushing him against her in a desperate hug. "Dani, thank God. What are you doing here?" He looked around her, taking in the setting around him for the first time. They were in a forest, with slender trees in the bright yellow of their autumn coloration. The sun was setting, and the trees were casting their shadows on the green grass.

_And, _he thought. _There's absolutely no sign of what particular forest we're actually _in.

"Have any idea where we are?" He asked, disentangling from his cousin.

Danielle shook his head. "Not in the least. I only woke up a few hours ago myself." Her eyes shifted from concerned to a tone of mingled fear and shock, as if she was remembering some fresh trauma.

"Well," he said, shaking himself. "I'm going to head up, see if I can't spot a city or town from the air." He leapt up into the air, shouting, "I'm going ghost!" And willing himself into his ghost form, expecting to feel the buzz of energy as the two concentric rings of etheric energy slid over him. He expected to feel his legs disappear out from under him, and free himself at least partly from gravity's restraint.

He felt nothing, only shock as nothing happened even as gravity cruelly yanked him back down. He landed on his feet and stumbled backwards in surprise.

"Shit," Danielle cursed again, a worried and pained look on her face. "Not you too."

Danny gave her a surprised look, as shock, and fear, and an almost overwhelming urge to throw up everything he'd ever eaten stole upon him.

"Whoever grabbed us," she said softly, putting her hand on his shoulder, "did something to us. My powers are gone, and so are yours."

Danny moved through the forested ridgeline, instinct that had literally been pounded into his very bones keeping the young man scanning his perimeter for threats even as the overwhelming temptation to turn inward gnawed at his psyche. Someone had reached into him and rewrote his very DNA, and in doing so torn out a piece of his soul that he'd finally come to terms with in the last year. He looked at Danni, and despite himself, the questions that always surrounded her came back. The most obvious question was, how the hell was she _his _clone. A clone was a genetic duplicate in every way, clones don't become the opposite sex of their progenitor.

_There's always androgen insensitivity syndrome_, he thought to herself, remembering something his mother said awhile back. _If AIS was the problem, then outwardly _he'd _be female, albeit with male reproductive organs in place of ovaries._

"Before you ask it's not AIS," Danni said matter-of-factly. "The thought occurred to me myself, so I went to a doctor I know who doesn't ask any questions. As far as she could tell, I'm a fully female, complete with functioning reproductive organs and eggs, at least when I was examined."

Danny nodded, not totally surprised. AIS had been a long shot anyway. "Then how," he was interrupted by a sudden aggressive yell coming from his right, and a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. Instinct took over, and a fist connected to a well-muscled arm flashed out, connecting with a satisfying meaty thwack. He turned to face his enemy, prepared to see a threat, probably a Guys in White agent, judging from his eyes. His eyes widened, even as aggression gave way to concern almost immediately.

Valerie Gray was standing in front of him, eyes blazing with an enraged deliriousness even as she charged again. Valerie stifled a curse even as he moved out of the way. He'd also noticed the welt on her chest where someone had injected her with something, something which, had at least included something from the same class of sedatives to which Valerie, his ex-girlfriend and still one of his closest friends, was violently allergic. As Valerie charged again, this time at something to her right that only she could see, heedless of the bruise, he revised his assessment.

_Judging by her current symptoms_, he thought, _it's the precise drug that she has the most problems with. Instead of getting a drowsy mass of flesh, muscle, and bone, they got a maniacal screaming Judo black belt._ Then his heart sank as he realized what _hadn't _happened. She hadn't shifted into her Red Huntress mode, meaning they'd managed to restrain her long enough to do whatever they did to them that took her powers, and dump her out here.

_Eh, at least I'm sure she gave them hell_, he thought to himself before he shook himself and tried to think about ways to restrain his friend until she came down out of the ionosphere. None presented themselves. _There is one option though_, and, hoping it would work, and she wouldn't attack him again, he shouted.

"Valerie!"

She turned to look at her mingled confusion and recognition in her eyes. "Pillsbury Dough Boy? Why do you sound so much like Danny?"

_Oh, dear God_, "Uh, yes, yes I am the Pillsbury Dough Boy," he said aloud. "You need to come with me, your friends and family are worried about you."

"Yes, sir, Mister Doughboy, sir."

"Valerie, are you okay?"

She turned to her and said, "Tinker Belle? Why do you sound so much like Danni, and for some reason, Anna-Sophia Robb."

Danni turned to him, shocked and, it seemed visibly sick. _What the fuck? _She mouthed.

_I'll explain in a minute_, he mouthed back. "Come on, Valerie," he said soothingly, "let's get you out of here."

She nodded, that glazed look in her eyes as she moved forward. "Better stay close to me, there are Heartless about."

"Of course."

Thirty minutes later, she was still babbling on and apparently thought they were inside _Kingdom Hearts. _ She walked up to him, and angry look on his face.

"I don't fucking believe this," Danni growled. "One of the best ghost hunters on the planet is reduced to a babbling mess who thinks I'm Tinker Belle and you're the Pillsbury Doughboy. She's tried to poke you in the belly three times to get you to make that laugh. This is grotesque."

"I know, but the sedative will clear from her system eventually," he said, "and hopefully soon because when she's having an idiosyncratic drug reaction her hallucinations can shift rapidly and at any time. Sure, she thinks we're advertising and Disney characters _now,_ but any second she could see us as demons and attack us." _Though it does say something good about her character that she'll fight monsters on instinct instead of run away from them_, he decided. He looked at her friend though, and sighed, reality returning. The truth is, she didn't deserve to have her powers stripped from her, reducing her to this undignified mess in front of him. The latter would wear off soon enough, the former…"

He shook his head. _Think about all this later, right now, we need to get out of this forest,_ he looked at the sun dipping below the horizon, causing the sky to blaze a dark orange-red even as the first stars began to peak out, _ or at least find food and shelter for the night_.

An agonized groan from ahead of him took him by surprise, and he looked to see Valerie moaning as she kneeled on the ground. Finally, the tall, dark-skinned young woman looked up at him, a pained expression on her face.

"Danny, did I call you the Pillsbury Dough Boy?"

He nodded. "Yes, you did."

She closed her eyes. "Ah. On a more important note, why are me, Danni, and you out in the forest in the middle of nowhere? We're not having some sort of bizarre, partially incestuous orgy are we? Then her eyes widened. "Why can't I access my powers?"

"I think the Guys in White-,"

"Guys," Danielle's voice snapped. "I think we've found shelter."

He turned to view, sitting amidst an overgrown patch of forest, a sizable two-story house. There were four front windows, and they were all boarded up. He walked up to the house and read the sign taped out front, indicating the place was foreclosed.

_Well, _he thought to himself, _it's breaking and entering, but we can pay the bank for the damages later, right now we need to at least find shelter. _He positioned himself by the side of the door, preparing to throw his weight into the doorjamb.

"Wait, Danny," Valerie called from behind her. "I still have that gift card you gave me for my birthday." She walked up to the door, noticeably unsteady on her feet, she leaned it against the door and wedged the card inside it. The lock disengaged with an audible pop and she pushed the door open. Danny looked inside and he gasped. The living room had shag carpeting and there was a large sofa across from the fireplace, with firewood still in the bin.

* * *

Danielle Fenton sat in the living room, a crackling fire casting its orange light and warmth over her, even as she dug beans and meat out of a can of chili with only her fingers. She thought about what she'd found during her perusal of the house. So far, she'd discovered that they were in New Mexico, specifically in the Lincoln National Forest, which was good, as they were still in the United States, and had at least a vague idea where they could find civilization. She'd also discovered that they'd taken everything portable, leaving most of the furniture when the previous owner's had up and abandoned the place. Almost everything, they'd left some canned goods in the kitchen, and the wood which was lighting up the fireplace.

She looked over at her friends. Valerie Gray was a dark-skinned woman about her height, with short black hair that tended towards being curly, and, surprisingly for someone who didn't have red hair, green eyes. She was also quite strikingly attractive, which is why Valerie, if what Danny had told her was true, had spent a brief time as Danny's girlfriend. Unfortunately, what had ended their relationship was her misguided enmity with Danny's now defunct alter ego, and the fact that even during their relationship he'd been in love with his current girlfriend Sam.

Danny had sprouted into a tall young man, of course, fair-skinned and coming in at a full six feet, with a body well-honed from what could only be considered three years of war since he was fourteen. He noticed, unlike last time, that his black hair now had a noticeable streak of white running through it. Valerie, she noted, as she sat on the sofa, had seemed to recover quite nicely from at least one of the indignities she'd endured, she was lucid, though bone tired. She had no doubt that the chili she'd eaten would help replenish her strength, though.

Danny stood up abruptly. "I'm going to make another sweep through the house, see if we've missed anything important."

"Okay," Danielle said, nodding in agreement. Valerie didn't say anything she simply nodded. As Danny walked up the stairs, she walked over and took Danny's seat. She turned to face her, a worn smile on her face, and Danni's heart abruptly began to burn. Valerie was closer to her than even Danny. And to have her go through this, to have them both go through this…

"How are you holding up?" she said aloud, her voice cracking ever so slightly.

Valerie stared off into the fireplace for a bit, as if searching for answers in the crackling orange light. Finally after a moment she said, her voice tired and ragged, "It's…hard. I felt like I was able to do some good in this world, and now," she shook her head. "What about you?" She asked

She leaned back in her seat, a seething ball of emotion inside her. _What a question,_ she thought. Her relationship with her powers had been something altogether different. "You have to understand, unlike you I didn't have an ordinary life when I got these powers. Instead they were part of me, have been part of me literally as long as I've been alive, which has only actually been three years. I feel like something ripped my arm off, or tore out a piece of my soul." She started blinking back tears, "I mean, I squelched it long enough to get us out of this but," and she squeezed her eyes shut, the tears flowing freely now. "Oh, God," and she pitched forward, putting her head in her hands as her body wracked with wheezing sobs. She abruptly felt warm arms wrap around her and she looked up to find herself being pulled into Valerie's embrace.

"It's okay," Valerie said. "You'll get through this, I know it."

"I know, it's just," she and, she began to blink back tears. "I wish I had more to fall back on than maturity and social skills that were literally programmed into my brain as my growth was accelerated."

"Hey," Valerie said, tilting her chin up. "No matter what Vlad shoved into your brain, you've made it your own. You're surprisingly mature for a fifteen-year-old."

She gave a derisive laugh. "Technically I fall into this biological gray area. Physically, you and are adults if you just argue biology, but I could just as easily be twenty if I wanted to. I believe it was Danny's current girlfriend who arbitrarily decided I was twelve at the time, which was a nice middle ground choice. Not one I necessarily feel I have to measure my legal age out from though, especially since I need to come up with a _permanent _ identity for myself now." _I'm chronologically three for God's sake, as long as it's a realistic choice, it doesn't really matter at this point _

"All right, what age do you want to be then?"

"Lately, I've decided I want to be seventeen," she said. _Not that I haven't presented myself as twenty or twenty-one, strictly to faciilitate my ghost-hunting and crime fighting duties of course, but they don't really need to know that._

"Wait, why not if you had the choice, make yourself eighteen, get out of the 'minor' category altogether?" Valerie asked.

"Somehow I didn't think you'd like the idea of me suddenly being older than you, so in the interest of putting you and Danny at ease-,"

Valerie waved off any further comments.

Danielle sighed. The truth is, her days as a nomadic half-ghost crime fighter had been numbered even before their unknown enemy, presumably the Guys in White, had stolen their powers. She'd had quite the fan following on the blogosphere herself, like Danny and Valerie, and it had only been a matter of time before she couldn't change identities and bluff her way wherever she was needed. _But I had intended to only give up the _nomadic _part of my life, possibly just settling down in, oddly enough Albuquerque or something. Or more likely going to Amity Park. _Now though, she was going to half to adjust to life without any powers to call on. _Granted, I didn't use my powers when I wasn't pursuing some mission but _still. She smiled, as she realized the other thing she had. She'd spent every moment of her free time, which was surprisingly a lot, in public libraries, both among the stacks and on the internet, soaking up information and skills like a sponge, and that had to count for something. _I've managed to teach myself calculus, I think I'll be fine._

"Guys!" Danny's call interrupted her musings. From the sound of it, he'd called from the general direction and the kitchen, and judging from its pitch, probably the basement. "We missed a very big something!"

The two women looked at each other, surprise mirrored in each others faces as they got up and walked into the kitchen.

"What did you find, Da-?" She heard Valerie begin only to stop as he revealed the opened out space of wall. Danielle's eyes widened. Inside was a room, about as big as the original basement. Danielle strode forward and her jaw dropped. In front of the right wall, were two rows of three metal shelves, loaded down with dried foodstuffs, canned goods, bottles of water, in short everything needed to survive a natural disaster. On the left side however, was a rack of rifles, M-16s interspersed with FW-4 EctoRifles. The mass-produced product of FentonWorks, Danny's own family company, which had undergone a metamorphosis after the asteroid crisis, after the technology of Vlad's personal design and the now defunct Axion Labs were transferred to their control by the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, with the research data dispersed to other companies. Danielle hadn't asked what precisely had happened, but evidently at least one of them had figured out that between them, they had managed to develop technology that, if not applied strictly to ghost hunting would advance human technology by five hundred years. That they had technology capable of improving the quality of life, relieving suffering, and give mankind easy access to the resources of their own solar system, and so they'd done it.

The technological revolution that FentonWorks and other companies had started was by no means complete, but even now, so much had changed. Everywhere factories on Earth were shutting down as companies throughout the developed world shifted their manufacturing capabilities into orbit. Many types of mines were shut down, the miners being retrained and sent to work mines on Mars and in the asteroid belt, and the immense amounts of money and resources starting to flood was poised to dramatically increase the pace of development in the former Third World.

But they also had quite a substantial market in the people who wanted to protect their friends and family from the more hostile denizens of the Ghost Zone, which apparently the people who'd lived here and presumably built the extra chamber in their basement were.

"What are you thinking?" She heard Valerie ask. "Survivalists?"

"Survivalists wouldn't abandon all their survival equipment." Danny responded, and she turned to see him going through the boxes that lined the floor of the foodstuffs shelves. "In particular their weapons."

"Maybe they had an outbreak of common sense?" Danielle put in, as she turned to watch Danny drop to the floor and start rifling through a box of clothes.

"These are boxes of clothes," Danny said. "Are these in your size?"

She looked down and saw that Danny had found a box of women's clothing. There were shirts, jeans, underwear, and bras, and all of them it seemed would fit her.

"Oh, look," Danny said, reaching into another box. "Towels, body wash, shampoo and conditioner."

She looked up into everyone's expectant gazes, and gave an annoyed sigh. "You want me to take a shower don't you?"

Danny and Valerie both nodded a bit too vigorously.

She took an exploratory sniff of her armpit, and cringed, her eyes suddenly watering. "Not that I didn't want to do that anyway."

* * *

Danielle threw another log into the fireplace as she stood her watch in the living room, one of the M-16s from the cache slung over her back. The sun had finally dipped below the horizon right when an exhausted Danny and Valerie had decided to turn in, falling asleep in front of the sofa in two sleeping bags they'd found in the cache. She looked at the clock they'd found in the living room perched now on the coffee table, it read 8:00.

She sighed as she thought about the rifle on her back. Proficiency with firearms was, for whatever reason, one of the skills Vlad had programmed her with during her abnormal… "gestation period." _Probably because that bastard wanted me to be ready for anything as one of his minions._ She shook his head, she'd often wondered if Vlad had planned to make an attempt to take over the world even while he'd been running his experiments. It may have been his ultimate long-term goal, even when he focused on just possessing Danny and his mother. She'd been a means to an end, just as all the clones of Danny that had _died _, dozens of them, as part of his last-ditch to "right the wrong" Madeline did by marrying Jack Fenton and having her son and daughter with him and not Vlad. And when even that ditch had fallen...

She shook her head, got up from where she was sitting in front of the fire, and moved to the window. As she walked softly out of respect for her companions, a flash of white light suddenly flashed through the open window. Danielle stopped, wincing at the painfully bright light, as it seemed to follow her even through her eyelids. Abruptly the light disappeared and she opened her eyes, blinking back the black and gold spots that swam in her vision.

She stood there as though rooted to the spot, her mind a blank as she tried to process what she'd just seen. She blinked rapidly as she cleared her head and dove for the window, three years of hard won instinct taking over as she pressed herself to the side of the window and tilted her head around the corner, pushing the curtain aside to look out. She peered into the forest, eyes and ears straining to pick up anything untoward out there among the trees, the bush, and the fallen leaves. There was no unusually bright light source in front of the window, nor any glow or reflection that would indicate one behind the house. There was nothing to be seen out there in the pitch night, save for the slight swaying of the trees.

As she stood there, the all too familiar combination of senses that she associated with her flight-or-fight response began to take over. She could hear her blood pumping in her ears, all the tiredness that had begun to take root washing away, and the emotional edginess that allowed her to react on the slightest sound, the slightest shape out of the corner of her eye began take hold _It could've been a helicopter_, she thought to herself, only to think an instant later, "_No, that's crazy I would've heard a helicopter's blades. A FentonWorks or Boeing model speeder? No, those have a distinctive low-level roar, I would've heard that too. It could be a meteor. _She heard a moaning sound from behind her, and she steeled herself against the overwhelming urge to turn around.

"Danielle," Danny said, voice rough with tiredness. "Wha-?"

"There was this weird bright flash of light out the window," Danielle said. "I'm not sure what it was, but I think we should go outside and take a look just to be sure."

Five minutes later, the three of them were moving through the forest, the leaves and undergrowth dampening their footfalls, combat flashlights illuminating the black night. Danielle had taken point, moving out front of them, eyes darting, her hand on her trigger. She looked back through the trees towards the house. They were moving in a wide circle around their hideout, hoping to catch anyone aiming to take them by surprise. If they didn't see anyone within site of the house, they were go back in and Danny and Valerie were to take the watch so she could get some sleep.

"I don't know guys," Valerie said. "It was probably just a bolide, they _are _rather bright."

Danielle sighed, the thought had occurred to her, but even if they didn't find anything and defaulted to the meteor explanation, it would still have been a good idea.

The sound of a rustling in the bush stopped her musings and her hand flew up to stop her friends. They immediately raised their weapons, lights shining into the underbrush as they swept the area around them. She stood there listening, ears straining for another sound. After a moment, sighed and turned to look at Danny.

"Do you hear-?" She began, the words dying in her throat as she saw the hooded and cloaked shape looming over Danny, a two-handed weapon being raised into position by mottled grey hands, poised to slice down on Danny's shoulder. "Behind you!" She shouted right when the blade came slicing through the air. Time seemed to slow in front of her as several things happened at once. Danny whipped himself out of the way of the blade causing it to bury itself in the ground. It's wielder wrenched it free as Valerie's shot took him in the torso. It stumbled, staggering back as Danielle pulled her trigger twice, shooting their attacker twice in the chest and knocking him to the ground.

"What," a heavily breathing Danny managed to bite out, his rifle trained on the creature on the ground, "the-hell-?" He circled around to the front, and approached the hooded shape on the ground cautiously and put the barrel of his rifle in the hood and poked it up curiously. Danny and Valerie both shouted in surprise and stumbled back away from the body, in the process allowing her a clear view of it.

She stepped back in surprise, shock, surprise, and fear flooding him. The figure was humanoid, but it had an oddly shaped head, somewhat reminiscent of the classic "gray" alien, but roughly as large and as thick as that of a human being. She looked down at her bullet wounds, and saw a shockingly violet shade of blood leaking out from the wounds in its torso.

"Did we just shoot-?"

"It sure as hell looks that way."

They were still standing there trying to process the ramifications of all this when they heard a low-level roar coming in from the northwest. As it got louder, Danielle looked up, mingled hope and fear coming through it. _That's probably a Speeder_, she thought to herself. _Though who's flying it?._ A minute later, she saw the unmistakable shape of a FentonWorks speeder touch down on the surface. She also saw the shape of the green plasma burst surrounding a stylized F that marked a FentonWorks model speeder. _Not that thatmeans the people onboard would be friendly like it used to_, she thought, _Danny's family company does mass produce them after all._

Danny and Valerie had apparently realized the same thing as they were moving through the underbrush, and up into cover behind two large oak trees, shaking herself out of her stupor she moved to a tree next to Valerie, her gun leveled on the fifty ton bulk of the Speeder. The small ship in front of her, illuminated by its own running lights, was twenty-eight feet long and nine and a half feet tall. Unlike it's predecessor, it was more aerodynamic, with nine foot long stub wings on either side, a welcome change from what was essentially the flying fuel tank that had attacked Vlad's Colorado base.

The abrupt whirring moan of hydraulics rang out and the large starboard side door began to open and two fair-skinned young women stepped out. One, was a young, dark-haired woman with violet eyes and roughly her height and build. The other was a couple of inches taller than her with long-flowing red hair and green eyes. She recognized the woman with the dark-hair instantly.

She opened her mouth only to hear Danny's voice snap over her, "Flash!"

Both women's eyes lit up in recognition and Sam shouted back what was apparently the countersign, "Thunder!"

Danny and Valerie bounded out from cover, relief on their faces and Danny closed with Sam and kissed her for a long moment.

"Danny, thank God," Sam said after they came up from the kiss, her eyes flying to the streak of white hair on his head, as if she'd seen it before. "The Guys in White smashed through your bedroom door and-,"

"They did something to our powers," Danny said, "but there'll be time to worry about that later." He beckoned them back into the forest. "Come on".


	2. Chapter 2

"Penetrating so many secrets we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it is, nonetheless, calmly licking its chops."

-H.L. Mencken, _Minority Report_.

Chapter Two

Sam stared down at the body on the forest floor, illuminated in the light's of everyone's flashlights, her eyes widened in shock. Finally, she managed to shake her head, and looked up at Danny, who was still looking at the alien creature. "My God," she said, her voice laced with shock. "I never actually thought I'd see this in my lifetime."

"Neither did I," Jazz muttered from next to her.

"It nearly killed you?" Sam asked, her brain still processing _that _revelation, as both a burning sense of anger and hate at the creature on the ground, and a sense of sheer relief at the fact that he was still alive. _Jazz and his parents didn't see it, but I was right near insane at the thought of never seeing him again. I don't think I could've controlled it for much longer. If he'd died- _ she shook her head. _Not now, I'll talk to Danny about this in a bit not before. _

"Yeah," Danny said nodding. "It did. If Danni hadn't shot, I wouldn't have been here now."

"Danni?" Jazz said from next to her, her green eyes looking at the person between Danny and Valerie. "I don't believe I've had the pleasure of meeting you."

Her friend's words shocked her out of her stupor, and she turned and looked at Jazz. "Never? She's your cousin isn't she?"

Jazz looked from Danielle to Danny before turning to her, a look on her face that managed to be both confused and accusatory at the same time. "Cousin? I've never seen this young woman before in my life." She wheeled back to Danny. "Cousin?" Danny's blue eye had widened, and he was glancing back and forth between them as though he had been cornered by lions in a ravine.

"Okay," Valerie said suddenly, not missing the opportunity to glare at Danny herself. "Danny, why don't you and Sam go in the house and discuss this among yourselves, while I try to smooth things over out here and get this body squared away. Okay, good," she muttered a little too quickly.

"I agree," Danny said quickly before reaching out and grabbing Sam and began tugging on her to go with him. _What is going on here _she thought even as she allowed herself to be dragged out of the forest, across the field, and into the house. As soon as she heard the door slammed shut behind her, Danny put his hands on her lips. "I'll tell you everything."

Ten minutes later, Sam found herself pacing the living room, her flight suit half-open to reveal the plain black shirt underneath it as the ramifications of everything that had happened washed over her. "So, let me be sure I read you correctly. Danni's actually a clone of you created by Vlad as part of his attempt to have you as his perfect son."

Danny nodded. "Yes, she is."

"Yet, she's apparently a fully functional female, and not just a male with androgen insensitivity syndrome, with her own ovaries and complement of eggs."

"That's what her contact confirmed," Danny said. "But-,"

"That's impossible." Sam finished for him. Really_ impossible. There's really only one possible explanation for her existence if that's true, but I don't want to think about._

"You know there's only one possible explanation for her existence right? It's not like Vlad and his collaborators managed to magically construct a compatible X-chromosome from scratch. Granted, between your parents and Vlad, human technology leapt forward five hundred years since the Asteroid Crisis over a year ago, but we can't do _that_."

"I don't like it anymore than you," Danny said, getting up and walking over to her. He put his hand on her shoulder. "But it's what it boils down to." Sam nodded. _Danny's genetic material had to have been combined with someone else's to make her. Somewhere out there, Danni had a mother._

"Are you all right?" Danny asked, "the last I saw of you, you had been punched to the floor and were being worked over with a shock stick."

"I'm fine. After you left, I came too, pulled myself off the floor, called Jazz, and we got up to the shipyard your parents have been building in orbit. The surveillance records of the Guys in White base near Oakbrook Terrace indicated that a heavy transport had left about twenty-five minutes after you were taken. We tracked it to a Guys in White airfield, near Moriarty in the Albuquerque area. We were tracking another transport leaving for Las Cruces when the surveillance package on my Speeder crapped out on me, so I had to return to FentonWorks orbital for a new one, by the time I'd gotten back, the window of opportunity for me to pick you up soon after they let you off failed and I had to go over the entire area with a fine toothed comb. The only reason we landed where we did was because Jazz picked up an unknown contact in the area, and we went to investigate on the off-chance it was a GIW transport possibly carrying you." She shook her head, anger and shame burning through her like a brand. "I'm sorry, if we'd been any sooner-,"

"You wouldn't have been able to stop what happened to us, Sam."

"That's just it, I was going to try," she said, her voice as hard as flint. "I would've snuck in, got you guys out, anything."

Danny shook his head. "Even if you'd somehow managed to get in without being undetected," he said, his shock plain on her voice, "you still probably would've been too late, all you would've ended up doing was getting caught, and you would have been lucky to get out of federal pen before you were thirty, or killed."

Sam shook her head_. _"I would've had to try. I couldn't leave you at the mercy of those…_people_, knowing what they're capable of, and not knowing if I would see you alive again." Her voice shook, at the thought of them being poked and prodded, at what they could've done to him. "No matter the cost to myself, I would've _had to try_."

"Oh, Sam," Danny said, his face transmuting to sadness as he walked over to her and pulled her into his arms, "my dear Sam."

Sam laid her head against his chest, wrapping her arms around him, as she finally felt the fear, anger, and sadness that anyone in her line of work learned to keep control of until the crisis was over finally fade.

_What's done is done. All we have to do is move on from here, both with Danny, Valerie, and Danni's powers and the alien corpse in the forest._

The door opened slightly and Danni's head peaked around the corner. Her eyes glanced over the two of them and she asked, "I'm sorry, am I interrupting anything?"

"No, of course not," Danny said. "What is it?"

"We've got the alien and its weapon loaded into the Speeder. It's time to go."

Danny untangled from her. "I believe it is then."

"What do you want to do about this place?"

Danny looked around him, nodding slightly. "Pull the foreclosure notice off the door. Sam, once we've dropped off the body I want you and Jazz to come back. There's a supply cache hidden behind a door in the basement. Empty it and come back, both because Danni's going to need new clothes if she's going to be staying with us full time and because we can't just leave all those guns lying around. Once that's taken care of, I have half a mind to buy this place. It's nice."

"What's in it?"

"Everything from canned and dried foods to clothes to several types of guns and ammunition, including Ecto-Rifles."

Sam's eyes widened. "Who lived here? I mean who gets all that stuff and doesn't take it with them when they pull out?"

"Maybe our alien had something to do with it. Not that we'll ever find out, at least from him."

The room suddenly felt as though it had become very cold, despite the fire still coming from the hearth. Sam turned to the fire burning in the hearth. _His species could've taken them, this is New Mexico after all. First the Roswell crash than that reputed landing at Holloman, it _is_ ground zero for anything creepy and weird. _

Danni looked at the fire in the fireplace. "I'll get that before we go. If you're going to buy it, we can't have it up in flames five minutes after we leave now can we?" She grabbed the pail of water next to the fireplace and dumped it on the fire, plunging the whole place in darkness.

* * *

Samantha lay awake in the bed in her guest quarters onboard the FentonWorks orbital shipyard, for the past six months the home of both Jack and Maddie and FentonWork's research and manufacturing facilities. Looking around the bare, Spartan room, she idly wished that the room had a window, but windows on a space station were limited to the observation decks only. While the current generation of shielding technologies had successfully managed to reduce the radiation that always came in from space until it was hardly more than the radiation one encountered in his or her lifetime, it was still best not to have too many windows to let cosmic rays in. She wished she was lying back in their bed at what she and Danny still called FentonWorks, where she'd been living the past six months. Having heard of their role in saving the planet, the local state judge had contacted a then-sixteen-year-old Sam and her friends who'd been at Antarctica, and quietly made it clear to them that she would waive the age requirement, and allow for them to appeal for emancipation. They had. She'd still lived with her parents for six months, but Danny's parents had, in true nerd fashion, opted to live at the FentonWorks shipyard full-time, along with their ghost research facilities. They'd promptly cleared out six months ago and left Danny the old red brick house, and let her move in with their tacit approval.

She sighed , a dark feeling stealing over her as her mind cycled back to the information Maddie had told her. Half of each DNA strand in his body had been made up of ordinary DNA and the other half of ectoplasm-based nucleic acid. Since human cells couldn't manufacture ectoplasm, the ectoplasm reproduced in each cell division by processes biologists still didn't fully understand. Once the components of ENA that "fooled" Danny's cells into thinking they were normal had been d amaged, their repair functions took over and all the ENA in his body was excised and replaced with normal DNA. They were fully human, all of them.

She was interrupted from her bleak musings by a knock on her door. Sitting up in her bed, she called. "Who is it?"

"Danny."

"It's unlocked."

The door opened and closed, and she turned to view Danny. He was standing in front of her, dressed in a green shirt and blue pants, yet there was a haunted look in those piercing blue eyes, as if a piece of his soul had been torn out of him. Despite herself her eyes were still drawn to that shock of white hair extending from his forehead back.

"Before you ask," Danny said. "They hit us with some sort of energy blast yes. While similar to ghost portal energies, it is different though, and it's lingering in our cell membranes. The tests my mom ran indicate that, in a very specific way, counteracts the energies of the ghost portals built by both my parents and Vlad."

"Meaning you can't get your powers back."

Danny nodded before sliding into the bed next to her. Sam reclined back down and felt Danny's arms wrap around her waist. Sam leaned into him ,eager to just relax in his arms for even a few moments.

"What are we going to do?" Sam finally asked.

"I don't know," Danny said, "they're still working on that alien though." She heard him breath behind her. "This is bad, being powerless at a time like this. I mean, what if there are more of them? What if that was a scout and this is the beginning of an invasion."

"How can we be so sure that they're all hostile? For all we know, the one that attacked you was their species' version of a gangbanger."

"Though alien gangbangers landing on planets to kill and rob random humans just strikes me as…bad science fiction, which, admittedly, our lives are looking like now. I mean, we live on a space station with artificial gravity and we have mining and science outposts on the Moon and Mars when a year ago we hadn't even been back to the moon since Apollo. Which, while awesome, still feels like science fiction even though we're living it."

"What are your parents going to do?"

"Finish the necropsy, tell us the results, and then contact the Department of Defense to turn the body and all the data over to them. Presumably they'll take it from there. The freighter _Euphrates _is carrying my father home from Mars, and should be in by end of day tomorrow; he'll help Tucker with the analysis of the scythe weapon, which if his results are accurate is also some sort of energy weapon."

Sam nodded. While the concept of battling hostile space aliens for the survival of humanity appealed to science fiction and videogame lovers like Danny and her, the fact remained that there were only six of them, and they were experienced fighting ghosts, not aliens. _God, a sentence like that would've gotten you laughed at or committed not that long ago,_ she shook her head. _What an age we live in._

As if on cue, the phone hanging from the wall next to her bed rang out. Sam gave an annoyed sigh, wishing that cell phones weren't prohibited aboard space stations.

"Sam," she said quickly.

"_Sam_," Maddie said, a tone of worry on her voice. "_If Danny's there with you now, put him on. It's about Danielle._"

Five minutes later, the two of them stepped into Jack and Maddie's quarters. The room was richly furnished, with a Persian style rug on the floor, a large sofa against one wall and a King-sized bed against the other wall. The sofa however, was already occupied, with Danielle sitting at the far end, wearing a red shirt and blue jeans, and drinking, judging by the smell, a cup of coffee.

"Should you really be drinking that at eleven at night?" Danny asked pointedly.

"I can't sleep anyway," she said, "not for this."

_Considering that the only way she can _possibly _be a fully functioning female human and be derived from Danny's DNA was if Danny's sperm had been combined with an egg, this is worth losing some sleep. That and she shot an alien._

"The necropsy's finished, all I have to do is get the data ready," Maddie said suddenly from behind them, and Sam turned to view Madeline Fenton closing the study door behind her. The slim, fortyish redhead, walked over to her desk and set down a manila folder. Instead of opening it however, she crossed over to Danielle and pulled her into a hug. Caught, in a sudden bear hug, Danny's …daughter, stiffened for a moment before returning the hug.

"I never got a chance to thank you earlier," Madeline said. "For saving my son."

Danielle pulled out of the hug and gave her a regarding nod. "No problem."

Maddie nodded back and turned her attention back to the manila folder on her desk. "From our limited DNA selection, we can safely say that the woman who "donated" her genes to Danielle isn't from anyone we have on file."

_Which would by default include Valerie and I,_ Sam thought, relieved both in the fact that _she _wasn't the one that was violated, and that it removed much of any awkwardness that would clamp down on having a good relationship with Danielle. They'd had her DNA sample on file since her and Tucker's near-fatal bout with Ecto-Acne, and Valerie's DNA had long ago been sampled and sequenced in their attempt to find out how her suit worked.

_All this proves is that some other poor woman had been violated, and her DNA used to create Danielle, which means..._

"Now," Madeline said. "I can give you a pretty good idea of where your mother's ancestors came from. All humans are divided into haplogroups, genetic mutations that serve as markers of early human migration. They are what is used both for genetic genealogy purposes, and used successfully to trace the origins of all living human beings back to East Africa, both on their father's side and their mother's side. The Most Recent Common Ancestor of all human beings on their mother's side is referred to as Mitochondrial Eve, because her existence had been reconstructed tracing the chain of haplogroups in mitochondrial DNA, which is only passed down through the mother via the X chromosome. She lived in what is today southern Ethiopia one hundred and ninety thousand years ago. The most recent common ancestor on the _male _side is known as, in keeping with the Biblical metaphor, Y-chromosomal Adam or just Y-Adam, as his existence was determined by tracing the haplotype's back on the Y-chromosome. Now, males can receive both the mitochondrial and y-chromosome tests, while females, due to having no y-chromosome, can only receive the mitochondrial DNA testing. Now, with mitochondrial DNA we're chiefly interested in the two hypervariable region, where the rate of mutation has been shown to be up to one hundred times that of the nuclear genome, and because it's so short, it can be scanned quickly for the information we need. Here's the rough map of the migration history of our Jane Doe's female ancestors from Mitochondrial Eve until today."

She opened up the manila folder and laid out a sheet of paper with a map of the world printed in black and white on it. Her eyes widened, as it felt like her heart was trying to climb out of her throat. Emanating out from the black dot labeled "Mitochondrial Eve," it passed down and into Kenya before crossing through Uganda into the Democratic Republic of Congo. It then deviated sharply, heading north into South Sudan and into southern Egypt before abruptly crossing the Red Sea into the Arabian Peninsula. From there it arced and curved into Jordan, through Iraqi Kurdistan and into northern Iran. It then crossed Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan into Mongolia, before deviating sharply again and crossing the vast expanse of Russia up into Siberia, crossing the now gone Bearing land bridge into Alaska. Once in North America it crossed from Alaska, down through Canada, crossing the length of the contiguous United States, crossed the Mexican border and terminated roughly in north central Mexico.

"Well," Danielle said, surprisingly calmly. "We know she's most likely Hispanic, which doesn't exactly narrow things down of course."

Sam stood there, rooted. _Paulina. Paulina's the mother, _the feeling had been accompanied by a shocked numbness entering her_. _She shook her head. _No, this map doesn't prove anything, millions of people share this migratory history and this haplogroup, it's not necessarily _her_._

* * *

Paulina Ortega was torn from the warmth embrace of sleep by what felt like something nudging on her arm. Paulina's eyes fluttered open and closed. They felt like they'd been stuffed with grit and were being dragged down b lead weights. "Polly, wake up," a familiar voice said suddenly, cutting through the haze? _Starr? What are you doing here? _Then she remembered: Paulina's parents had allowed her to stay over with her while they were out-of-town on vacation. Her eyes flew open. In the half-light of the moon coming through her window, she saw her friend. The tall, leggy girl with long blonde hair was kneeling next to her, her green pupils contracted, breathing heavily in obvious fear.

"What's wro-," only to feel Starr's hand clamp itself over her mouth.

"Shush-up," her friend said harshly in a low voice. "There are…creatures outside. Not ghost, not human."

"What do you mean?"

"Peek out the window," Starr said softly. "Don't let them see you." Paulina, her own anxiety level rising at Starr's tone, threw her covers aside, dropped to the floor, and half-crouched, walked to the window.

She pulled aside the covers, and her blood ran cold.

There, in the rural area outside of town where her parents lived, in her parents vegetable garden, six humanoid figures stood in a tight group in. In the cloudless night, the full moon illuminated everything. They were tall, six feet tall, and had gray skin. One of the creatures whose face she could see moved its head, and its eyes shown in moonlight. They were dressed in dark robes, albeit with their hoods pulled down, and every one of them was carrying a wicked looking scythes, the moon's light reflecting off their blade.

She yanked her head out of the window. "What the hell are those?"

"I don't know. Have you called the police?"

"No."

"Why not?"

Starr looked at her as if she were crazy. "For all we know they could have a small ship out there, monitoring this house for any signals. If we call anyone they could turn us into a smoking crater while we were still waiting for someone to pick up."

Paulina sighed. _Damn it, she's right._ She shook her head, an idea occurring to her. "Our respective families taught us how to shoot," she whispered. "The gun cabinet is in my parent's room across the hall, the access code to get in is my birthday."

"You think they'll attack?"

"Can we take the chance they won't? They're out there for a reason."

Starr nodded, then dashed across the room. Stopping for a moment, she grabbed the duffel bag next to the door and disappeared into the darkness.

Paulina peaked out the window. The group of…well she could only describe them as aliens were still standing out there.

_No one's going to believe this,_ she thought to herself. _Unless_. She moved over to her drawer, and pulled it out to reveal a small video camera. Turning it on, she placed it as surreptitiously as she could in the windowsill right when the door behind her creaked.

She wheeled around, her heart pounding in her ears, only to relax slightly to see Starr stealing back into the room. Moving over to her, she reached into the duffel bag and pulled out both of her father's shotguns, handing one to her before pulling out two FN Five-Seven pistols.

"They're both loaded," she said as she handed her a sidearm before handing her more clips and shells.

"Good thinking."

She looked down into her yard. They were still there.

"They outnumber us three to one," Paulina pointed out.

"They outnumber us three to one yes, but they have bladed weapons," Starr pointed out. "We have guns. That saying about not bringing a knife to a gunfight holds true for scythes as well, Polly."

"I know." Paulina nodded. "And besides if they knew we were here, they'd probably have blown us away by now from any ship they have."

"They know we're here," Starr said shaking her head. "I mean they must have space travel, which means they must have sensor technology, like infrared cameras, that can see in this house, and see the two large heat blooms named Starr Corner and Paulina Ortega. They know we're here, they probably just don't want to draw attention to themselves by blowing a house away."

Paulina opened her mouth to say something, but a low rumbling sound reverberating through the house interrupted her. A bright light shined through the window, illuminating the entire room in a harsh bright light.

"What are they doing out there? Then she heard the unmistakable sound of something landing on the ground outside. She looked out it, and her eyes widened. A ship had landed out there, roughly the same size as a Speeder but a darker gray and more trapezoidal, and the aliens were slowly filing into it, scythes slung over their shoulders in parade position as they filed aboard. The door closed, and the rumbling filled the air again as the ship took off once more.

Paulina and Starr watched as the ship, glowing brightly lifted itself off that ground and moved up into the sky, its running lights receding before it finally disappeared amongst the stars. Paulina stood there, staring up into the sky, a shocked numbness flooding her, not truly focused on anything as her mind struggled to wrap itself around what it just saw. Finally her mind snapped out of it when she saw Starr reach across her field of vision and switch her camera off before removing it from the windowsill.

Shaking herself out of her stupor, her mind still reeling, she finally managed to ask, "What do you think we should do?"

"Talk to Danny Fenton," Starr said immediately. "He may not be the Ghost Boy, but he's the next best thing when it comes to that sort of thing."

Paulina was reminded of his leadership role during the raid to rescue their parents a few years back. He'd done his job well, before inexplicably disappearing right before Danny Phantom showed up to finish the job. _Come to think of it,_ she thought, _he _always _disappears right before he shows up. _She was rather uncomfortably reminded of Clark Kent's paper-thin disguise as Superman. _Maybe he-_she shook her head. _No. Couldn't be._ She shook her head. _At any rate, she's right. Besides, I've been a jerk to him for years._

"Do you think he'll even talk to me," Paulina asked, "I've been an asshole to him since we were twelve. That's a lot to forgive., even if you regret it, which we, which I, do."

A smile appeared on Starr's face. "We've come a long way, since Antarctica, you know? Our parents are, frankly, astonished that we're not still the same, petty, materialistic loons we were even a year ago. Then again, I suppose the fact that we nearly died along with our entire race does that to people."

Paulina nodded, that was part of what had caused her to reevaluate her life, but not all of it. She looked out her window, thinking about what had just transpired in the yard behind her. She knew, she didn't know why, but she _knew _that the second she took her footage to Danny, that her life would change again, forever, that she'd be tested as she'd never been tested before, perhaps to the very limit of her humanity. That, she wouldn't just turn this over to Danny and run, her own nature wouldn't allow that. _What was it my _abuela _said, growth requires risk? Well, this is a pretty big risk I'm about to undertake, but this is a pivotal moment in human history, and if I'm going to play any part in how we handle it, I need to step up to the plate._

Paulina sighed, and said the words that would irretrievably bind Starr and her into Danny's circle of friends beyond all hope of reversal. "Let's get dressed and go see Danny."


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three

"You cannot say, or guess, for you know only  
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,  
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,  
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only  
There is shadow under this red rock,  
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),  
And I will show you something different from either  
Your shadow at morning striding behind you  
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

T.S. Elliot, _The Waste Land_

Valerie Gray sighed as she sat at the heavy wooden desk in one of FentonWorks' guest rooms. It had been after one when they'd finally gotten back to Amity Park. Her father, of course, had tried to insist that she stay at home with him tonight, citing the advantages of not being alone, and the gaping hole where the front door of her apartment had been. Her eyelids wanted to close as though they were being dragged down by lead weights, and she wanted to oblige them, but every time she closed her eyes, the images returned, of bullets exploding into a gray-skinned creature's chest and torso. Of the glare in its eye as its blade sliced through the empty air where Danny's arm had been even a heartbeat before. Her eyes would fly open as shock bolted through her. She got up and walked over to the window, half-expecting to see a squad of gray skinned aliens massing across the street to storm the house, after the Guys in White got through with them.

She shook her head, _There's nothing out here, and now that the GIW's stolen our powers, I doubt they'll be paying attention to _us _again_ _anytime soon. Now, all we have to do is figure who those aliens are, what they want, and what their connection is to all this. _

_If there is a connection, _she thought to herself. She shook her head in annoyance. _This is ridiculous, _she thought. _I am going to turn this lamp off, get in that bed, and get some goddamn sleep. _She clicked the desk lamp off and, her bed still slightly illuminated by the street lights filtering through the window, found her way to the roughly square-shaped form in the dark. She froze as the unmistakable sound of a car driving up the road, briefly casting the room in the white light from the headlights. She walked over to the window and looked down, and her eyes widened in surprise and concern as she saw a black Ford Taurus pulled up in front of the house. The light was on inside, and she was even more surprised to see what she thought was Paulina and Starr inside.

_What are those two doing here at this time of night?_ She thought to herself. Paulina she'd had no real contact with since that unfortunate incident with that giant ghost dog what seemed to be a lifetime ago, since she'd been ostracized from Casper High's A-list, for no longer meeting the standards she now realized as ridiculous. _High school,_ she thought to herself. _I'm glad I got emancipated, got my GED and got out of that failing shithole when I had the chance. _She remembered idly bringing up to Jazz her problems with them, and getting advice, which had turned into a lecture, which (in true Jasmine Fenton fashion) had firmly placed her on the "Adolescence is artificial" faction in developmental psychology and cultural anthropology. _The most that place has done for me, was cause me and my friends nothing but pain, by encouraging young men and women who not even a hundred years ago would've been considered adults in all but name to childishly discriminate against their peers for the most ridiculous of reasons, like lack of money, too much money, and getting slobbered on by a giant ghost dog. _She sighed, a palpable sense of shame at her previous behavior pattern of, as her dad described it, "taking her grudges, holding onto them until they died, and then having them stuffed and mounted." _The sad part is, not counting special classes, the system as a whole isn't even giving an education which makes the skewed emotional development worth it anymore. _Which meant that one of the people who had once genuinely been one of her two best friends had cast her off, and her other best friend only maintained contact with her if she wasn't going to be seen by anyone else, and it had all been for basically nothing.

_Though from what I've heard they've been trying to turn over a new leaf since the Asteroid Crisis, so maybe there's hope, _as she moved towards the door to tell Danny and Sam that they had sudden visitors.

As she walked out the door she saw Paulina and Starr talking furtively, but her pace increased as she saw in how wide their eyes were, and how much their hands were shaking, that they were scared. _No, _she thought as she closed on the car. _No, not scared, honestly, sincerely _terrified. As she walked towards the car Starr saw her and put her hand on Paulina's shoulder, gesturing in her direction before she opened her passenger side door and the two of them got out of the car and walked towards her.

"What are you-," she began only to grunt in pain as Starr ran up to her at full speed and collided with her before enveloping her in a giant bear hug.

"What's wrong, Starr?" Valerie asked, instinctively returning her oldest friend's desperate hug, her annoyance and disappointment washed away in that moment.

"We saw something," she began. And like a dam breaking she started going on in a rush about how they'd seen large creatures boarding some sort of ship in front of Paulina's house. Her eyes widened and she grabbed her shoulders and shoved her away from her.

"AndIwassoscaedand-,"

"Starr, Starr! Starr Corner! Slow down, what did these creatures look like? Were they, say about the size and build of adult humans, but with a head the rough shape of the aliens we see everywhere in paranormal documentaries, but with skin a darker shade of grey?"

Starr nodded, with a vigorousness born of anxiety and fear. "Yes. You've seen them before, Val?"

"Yes, I have. I need to get you two inside."

They stepped inside to see Danny, Sam, and Jazz waiting at the bottom of the stairs. All three of them had their arms crossed in front of them. Sam however, was the only one actively glaring and she was doing that at Paulina. The rest of them were staring at their two new guests with a mixture of surprise and annoyance.

"What is it, Paulina?" Danny asked, cutting straight to the point, his voice rough with exasperation and tiredness, no doubt at getting interrupted from getting any sleep for what seemed to be the umpteenth time tonight. Valerie heard the other woman sigh before she began to pace slightly back and forth on the floor.

"Tonight," Paulina began with a sigh. "Starr woke me up…"

Valerie stood there, stunned into silence along with the rest of them, even Sam had dropped her glare for a look of shock. If what Paulina was saying was true, then these aliens had a more widespread presence on Earth than they thought. _And her making up a story doesn't make any real amount of sense, _Valerie thought to herself. _Why would she do that, and make up aliens that sound like they were exact matches for the one we killed in New Mexico? _She felt a shiver crawl up her spine. _Whatever they are, there's more of them than we realized._

"Do you have proof of this?"

Paulina nodded, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a jewel case with a DVD in it. "I recorded the whole thing as proof that this happened. Take it if you want to test it to prove I didn't fabricate this."

"No need," Danny said solemnly. "I believe you. Turn the TV on and pop it in the blu-ray player, let's see what we're dealing with here."

* * *

Paulina Ortega stared at the video on Danny's television, watching with the rest of them as the…creatures which she could only describe as aliens, silently filed into the glowing interior of their ship before gently lifting off into the night with that same low hum she'd heard earlier that night. Then the recording ended, the screen going abruptly blank before switching to the generic selection menu the DVD burner on her computer had added.

An annoyed sigh caught his attention and she whirled around to see Danny, his arms crossed in front of his chest, his eyes narrowed as he stared at the screen. "Shit," he growled roughly.

From his left, his sister said, her face a mixture of anger and thoughtfulness as she pondered what they'd seen. "They do seem to be members of the same species we saw in-," Jazz said calmly. Her eyes widened as if she suddenly remembered something and she abruptly glanced over at her and Starr before she quickly amended whatever she had been about to say with, "we came across."

Paulina glared as white-hot anger and annoyance flooded her and before she could stop herself, she found herself blurting out, "Hey! I'm not stupid, so please don't act like I am by editing out information."

Jazz glared at her before Danny put his hand on her shoulder, causing her to turn and look at him. "It's all right, Jazz. Tell her what she needs to know."

Jazz, still giving Paulina an irritated look gave a resigned sigh of her own before she resumed talking. "Earlier this evening," she remarked, her voice still tinged with annoyance. "Danny, Valerie, and a cousin of ours, fought and killed an alien that attacked him in a forest without provocation. When Sam and I got there, we retrieved the body and took it to FentonWorks Orbital, so our mother could begin studying it." She paused as she clamped her hand over her mouth to cover up a yawn. "She finished, but since it was getting close to midnight, she's going to present on it tomorrow."

Paulina nodded before turning to look at the clock. _It is awfully late_, she thought to herself, stifling the urge to yawn herself, but still, she doubted she would be able to sleep, not after what she'd seen, and not after what Jazz had told her. She felt a cold feeling forming in the pit of her stomach, as she abruptly realized just how close she and her friend had come to death. _If they had no compunction about attacking Danny in a forest for no reason, then they would've had no problems with killing us both. Starr was probably right when they said that they probably didn't want to attract attention by killing us. One thing though…_

"How'd you manage to kill one of them?"

He saw a visibly haunted look on his face. "We shot it."

_Shot it? _A vision of Danny in hunter's camouflage clothing and face paint occurred to her. "You were out hunting I take it?"

The haunted look on Danny's face rapidly became one of pain. "Not exactly."

She shot Starr a puzzled look. _Not exactly? What does that mean? There's something here no one's telling me. _She stifled her annoyance: the way she'd treated them all over the years entitled them to not share everything with her.

_More to the point, _"Can we be there, when the information is presented?" Paulina asked aloud.

"Why on Earth should we allow that, after all you've done?" Sam blurted suddenly, stepping close to her and glaring straight into her eyes. "You've been shitty to all of us for years. You dated Danny just to make me jealous when we weren't even dating then. Why do any of us owe you anything?"

Paulina flinched under Sam's glare, her shame and self-disgust over her actions coming to the surface, along with a palpable sense of anger. Everything the other woman had just laid into her about was absolutely correct. She felt especially ashamed for that little fiasco, particularly the dragon part. _Which wouldn't have happened if I hadn't decided to date Danny just to hurt Sam…for what? Because she prefers dark clothing, because her interests run to what was formerly considered the paranormal? If even half the rumors swirling around them since the Miracle in Antarctica are true, I owe her, I owe them _all_ my life and the life of my family, a dozen or more times over. But I'm not going to let her shame into backing out of this._

"You're right, Sam," she said finally, looking her straight in the eye. "I have treated you horribly." She looked over the group assembled in the Fentons' living room. "I've treated you _all _horribly, and you have every right to be angry at me. But _ do not _ expect me to walk away from this because of it."

"Why not?" Danny said suddenly, walking towards her and Sam, giving her a curious look. "You never struck me as being interested enough in this sort of work to pursue this full time."

"That was before 'this sort of work' used my front yard as a docking area," Paulina half-growled, her ire rising. "If they're as aggressive as you suggest they are, then they only spared us because they didn't want to draw attention to that. I can't ignore a possible threat like that, I couldn't ignore it when I joined your attack on Ember and Youngblood to rescue my parents and I can't ignore it now." She turned back to Sam, giving her a sharp glare, "If you really don't want me here, I'll understand, and I'll leave. But I'll try to find out who these creatures are and what they're doing here, on my own. I know how to handle a gun, and I like to think of myself as smart. I have a chance, a slim one of actually doing something to help with this, even if I get killed in the process. But I'd rather work with, work for, someone who might actually know what he's doing. I'll do what I have to, I'll take whatever orders you give me, you say 'jump' I'll say 'how high.'" Unbidden the memory of her actions towards him came to the fore, and she closed her eyes, feeling tears begin to back up. "And perhaps, perhaps, in doing so I can do something to make up for all the pain and misery I've inflicted on you both."

"Same goes for me," She heard Starr declare a second later, causing her to shoot her a surprised look, even though she knew her participation would've went without saying. "Where she goes, I go."

Utter silence descended upon the room and she opened her eyes back up to see the others staring at her, their eyes wide, utter shock on their faces. She wasn't sure however, if it was just because she was tired or that it was actually there, but she was fairly certain she saw a trace of pride in her friends green eyes. She turned to look at Danny staring at an equally wide-eyed Sam, who nodded softly. Danny nodded back before turning to face her again.

"Well," Danny said finally after giving her an appraising stare, "I think…under the circumstances we could certainly use your help."

Paulina nodded relieved . "Thank you."

Danny nodded again. "Yes, well," he looked at the clock on his cable box, which read 2:00 in stark white numbers. "We're all tired, and we should get some rest. It's late. You two are welcome to stay here until…well, later this morning. We still have a couple of guest rooms available at the far end of the upstairs hallway, one of them being my former bedroom."

Paulina nodded, her eyes suddenly feeling like they were being held down by lead weights again. "Thank you, Danny."

"Don't mention it," Danny responded matter-of-factly, "we do have to get some rest before we all trek up to FentonWorks Orbital tomorrow. So, please, let's all go to bed."

As she approached the final two doors facing each other at the other end of the hall, she could've sworn she heard one of the bedroom doors close softly.

Danielle Fenton nodded. Sound in the living room carried exceptionally well up here, and she'd heard every word that had been exchanged downstairs. This "Paulina Ortega" had been listed as a possible candidate for her biological mother by Sam, and so when Valerie had announced she and her friend had shown up, she'd opted to stay behind while everyone else went downstairs to meet her. She'd wanted to listen in, to gain the measure of this person who may have contributed half of her DNA to her, without complicating things with her presence. She had smirked derisively at how Danny had managed to neatly sidestep the issue of her existence and just where and how they found the alien in the footage Paulina had apparently shown her. Telling Jazz to explain to Paulina "what she needed to know" was a discreet way of telling her to remove any references to his erstwhile identity of Danny Phantom, and the thorny matter of who _she _was. At least until a more appropriate time, when she'd earned their trust.

_She sounds to me like a strong, independent young woman, proud yet determined to become a better person through all this; the day when she can be trusted with the full truth of all this will come soon enough._ She sighed, a distinct burning sensation. _If she does turn out to be my biological mother, she deserves to know what Vlad did to her along with Danny, taking their DNA and making a whole new person out of it, myself, without either of their knowledge or consent. _

She walked over to her bed as softly as possible to reduce any possible noise before sliding into the bed. "Good night, Paulina Ortega." She said as she closed her eyes. "Whether you're my mother or not, I'll be honored to meet you tomorrow."

* * *

In the inky blackness of space, something slid into orbit over a reddish-orange planet four planets out from its parent star. If it was capable of having such ideas, it would've remarked on the planet's differences to its conventionally habitable neighbor. It had a diameter half that of the third planet out from the star, with forty percent of the gravity of that world. It's core, unlike Earth's, had frozen solid billions of years ago, the two captured asteroids that served as its moons had not created strong enough tidal stresses to keep the core going. As a result, the magnetic field had collapsed, dooming the ocean that had once covered one-third of its surface and slowly stripping away the atmosphere of Mars to the comparatively thin shell it was today. The radiation that would once have been held at bay now had free reign, dooming every unprotected lifeform within seven meters of the surface.

If it had been capable of doing so it would've marveled at the fact that life had a foothold there now. The indigenous population of the third planet had well nearly a dozen installations on the planet, with half a dozen more still under construction. All were domed to provide air pressure with magnetic torus' holding back the radiation and keeping it within normal levels the humans on the third planet had evolved to withstand. Even the open pit mining structures were domed as the humans dug through the lifeless soil for the minerals their civilization back on the third planet required. One by one, it photographed each and every domed structure, transmitting images of them all back to its waiting mothership in the space beyond Pluto. It circled the planet meticulously taking pictures of each installation in its field of view constantly, for hours on end as it floated in its orbit.

Finally, on its fourth such pass over the equator of the planet, it detected something not on the planet below Of course, while it had been diligently recording the position of as many human facilities on the fourth planet as it could locate, it had been keeping an eye on as many of the human ships as it could keep track of. That in and of itself was not an issue, as in reality, as opposed to fiction, hiding any sort of object in space was extremely difficult: they simply emitted too much heat and radiation to stay hidden, even if the infrared sensors on board weren't really capable of learning anything more than the fact that it was there at all. As a result, all the drone's simple programming concerned itself with was that the object was coming towards him on a straight line course, and knew the object wasn't transmitting the codes that identified it as non-hostile. The drone continued taking it's pictures and scans of the installations darting the surface and dutifully transmitting them back towards its waiting mothership in the inky blackness of space.

Finally, the object coming towards it crossed a "threshold" in its programming. Compensating for how long it took the infrared light from the target to reach it and extrapolating its position from that, its programming decided that the risk of detection was now too great, it activated a time-delayed charge, the small amount of oxygen in the drone combining with the force of the explosion to eliminate both the drone and any evidence that it was anything other than an unusually hot object against the background of space, but not before sending off one last transmission to tell it what happened.

Deep in the space beyond Neptune, the mothership received its drone's last transmission, informing it that it had self-destructed to avoid detection. On board the ship, the images of the facilities on the surface were analyzed, and a decision was made. The lumbering bulk, nearly one mile of starship lit off its drives, and headed past Neptune. Headed for the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter where they would wait to carry out the next phase of their plan.


	4. Chapter 4

"There are truths that are not for all men, nor for all times."

-Voltaire.

Chapter Four

Danny walked into the observation module on FentonWorks orbital station _Hephaistos. _The circular room was awash in blue light shining in from the large window that dominated the front of the room. He stared out, briefly transfixed by the view from this module just as he always was. Caught in the blue halo that shone up from the edge of the atmosphere, it seemed they were floating above a vast sea of white clouds. He stared at them, taking in every curve, every bulge, every pattern in the vast sea of white. And out beyond the sea, hanging in the sky with them, was their moon, Luna, far larger than anything he'd ever seen just staring up at it from Earth.

_Since I was seven years old I've dreamed of this sight, _he thought, resisting the urge._ Now, ten years later I see it every other day._ He smirked. _One day, you're on top of the world, you have a friends whom you love and love you in return, you have a girlfriend you adore, the ghost incursions have become more manageable, and to top it all off you're out here. Taking our first steps into a new frontier._ _ And then it all goes to hell. _

"Hey honey," a familiar voice said from behind him. He turned to view Sam standing behind him. Despite his mood, he couldn't help but react to her. Sam had definitely changed in the last year. She had...blossomed. She was no longer the scrawny, somewhat boyish young woman she'd been, and his hormones were disrespectfully aware of that. On another note, Sam was dressed somewhat somberly today, forgoing even the dark purples and reds she favored for a plain black t-shirt and black jeans. Her somber mood had been reflected in the look of dark concern on her face. "I take it we both walked in here for the same reason," she said before she walked over and stood next to him, staring out the window It wasn't a question.

"To lose ourselves in this," Danny answered. "At least for a time." He resumed staring out the window. He tried to focus on the cloud bank, on seeking out the myriad of patterns in that sea of white cloud before he gave up. "Damn it," he blurted out. "One moment you think you've got your life under control, that you at least have a handle on the rules of the game and the minute your back is turned, the rules change. While you're trying to come to grips with that, the rules suddenly change again."

"Tell me about it," Sam said. "It's what I said last night, we are out of our element. We're ghost fighters not alien fighters. I have no doubt we could learn to become alien fighters, but in that wealth of physiological information your mom has just got done imparting to us, we have virtually no practical information we can use. I mean, she's suggested ways to kill them, but we know too little about them to countenance that. What happened to you, and Paulina's suggestion aside, we have no way of knowing what kind of threat we're facing."

Danny nodded sympathetically. "And that is not our only problem. Without my powers, our ability to fight _ghosts_ has taken a serious blow."

"We still have our wits, and our intelligence, and our guns," Sam said confidently, the renewed strength in her voice perking him up. "And it's an enemy we still have experience fighting. We'll do fine." Her eyes widened in surprise, as if something had just occurred to her. Though there will be a bit of a PR problem when people realize that Danny Phantom, the Red Huntress," and Dani with an I no longer show up. _Anywhere._"

It was Danny's eyes turn to widen. "You're right. And we still have Paulina and Starr to deal with. Should we tell them?"

Sam gave a heavy sigh, closing her eyes as if she didn't want to think about it. He understood why. Paulina had a raging crush on her Danny Phantom side. It didn't take much thought to conclude that if she learned he had been Danny Phantom, his feelings would be transferred whole cloth to him.

"My first impulse is no," Sam said finally. "But, as much as I hate to admit it, if she is truly turning over a new leaf, and is willing to use that formidable brain and charisma she wasted on trying to stroke her own ego for good instead of vicious petty attacks, we need her. And she needs us. Tell her, at least before we go home today." She gave another sigh. "And come what may."

"It'll be fine," Danny said in an attempt to reassure her. "She _has _matured."

"Let's hope you're right," Sam said.

"I will tell her, but after we've given some thought to how we're going to handle this."

She smirked derisively, "On that note, at least for ghost fighting, we should buck up on our training. We wouldn't want your parents to decide to revoke our payroll now that the Phantom part of us is gone."

She meant the last comment in jest, but the word "Payroll" sparked something in his brain. All at once the answer had come to him. _Of course,_ he thought, a smile breaking from ear to ear on his face. Without thinking he grabbed Sam by the shoulders before pressing a hard kiss against her lips.

Sam froze slightly before leaning back into his kiss. He broke it quickly. "Sam, you are a frigging genius." He pulled her towards the door. "Come on,

Thirty minutes later Danny was sitting in the conference room , watching as Sam (whom he'd dispatched to gather the others while he got what he needed for this) and the rest of their number filed in, sitting at the cherrywood U-shaped conference room that dominated the setting. They quickly resumed sitting in the seats that they had occupied not an hour earlier when her mother had given her briefing. Fifteen chairs black leather upholstered conference chairs had been arranged around that table. Sam and Tucker sat in two of the three chairs in the base of the U, to the right and left, respectively of his center seat. Of the six seats on either side, Valerie sat to Sam's immediate right, while Tucker sat to Jazz's left. Paulina had resumed her seat on Jazz's right while Starr sat down to the left of Valerie.

They were all sitting there now, staring at him expectantly, and, unexpectedly he felt a shudder. During the manic rush to get all the presentation materials over, it had all made perfect sense to him. Now, their eyes were on him. His friends, his sister, and two young women he hoped one day to count among his friends were staring at him. They could all kill his idea. Kill it with one word: No.

_Or knowing Sam, Valerie, and Paulina, "NO!" with a stream of swearing._

He sighed. _Time to play for all the marbles. _"For starters..."

* * *

"We should be under no illusion that the government is going to take...effective action to investigate this," Danny said as Sam leaned back in her chair. "They may investigate this fully, or they may pretend this is only an isolated incident and put the corpse and my mother's reports in a wooden box, nail the lid on, and secret it away in a government warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant."

Sam couldn't help but chuckle along with everyone else at this reference to _Indiana Jones. _"I mean seriously, it took them a long time to create the Guys in White. Unfortunately they created an organization that seemingly goes out of its way to be more dangerous to us then to the evil ghosts they're supposed to be focusing their efforts on. Between the Guys in White, the constantly shifting Ghost Zone power blocs, and now the possibility of an alien threat, we've reached the end of all the ghost fighting we can do on our own."

Danny took a deep breath, and leaned back in his chair, as if willing himself to say what he was about to say. "What we have to do," he said finally, with all the firmness of a man who'd just decided on the best of a bad lot of options, "is build that organization ourselves."

Sam felt her eyes widen as silence reigned in the conference room, and everyone else joined her in looking at Danny as if he'd suddenly grown another head that quoted Shakespeare's sonnets.

_This is crazy_ she wanted to say, then she remembered the boarding action against Youngblood and Ember, and the stunning success of that mission. He'd led close to a hundred people in that mission, nearly a full company, and pulled it off. It had helped, no doubt by the fact among their interests had been wargaming, and as a result of a particularly memorable (and meticulously researched) campaign they'd played not a few months before his accident, had run through a similar scenario before

Knowing about how to hit a ship in a simulated mission and being able to actually do it are two entirely different things however, and wonder of unspeakable wonders they'd managed to pull that off too. It had been even more amazing because the people under them had had absolutely no experience in that kind of fighting and wouldn't have touched a wargame that wasn't on the Xbox with a ten foot pole. People he'd somehow managed to turn, in the limited amount of time available, into the strike force that had managed to cut through Youngblood's defenses.

They had been reminded of that strike apparently, as the half-formed arguments based on their skills and or age died on their lips.

"Wait a minute," Paulina said, brow furrowed in puzzlement. "Why not just leave all the ghost-hunting to Danny Phantom, the Red Huntress and that half-ghost girl that popped up year or so ago?"

The uncomfortable silence that had settled over the room after Danny's announcement returned. She heard Valerie sigh and looked over to see her lean back into her chair and cross her legs, a haunted look settling over her face.

She sighed, her own emotions roiling. _Well, this is all happening sooner than I thought. _She struggled to clamp down on the fear, the instinctive unreasoning fear that Paulina's affections would transfer whole cloth to Danny upon her learning the truth, and that Danny would reciprocate. There was going to be no omitting of any reference to their powers _this _time.

She heard Danny sigh, and the scraping of a chair on the deck plating and she turned to around to view him standing up. "Because Danny Phantom, the Red Huntress, and Dani are gone. They died in New Mexico, at the hands of the Guys in White."

Paulina pitched forward in her chair as though Danny had punched her in the gut. "What?" Then her eyes widened as she caught his full meaning. "No." She whispered hoarsely. "You?"

Danny nodded. "Yes."

* * *

Paulina Ortega leaned back in the conference room chair, releasing a heavy sigh as she struggled to bring her emotions under control. She stared at the empty podium in front of her, pointedly refusing to look at the dark-haired young man with blue eyes next to her. At least for the moment. She seethed, her emotions a volatile boil as she still struggled to process the implications of it.

_Danny Fenton,_ she thought. _Daniel James Fenton is, _was, _Danny Phantom_. The enraged beyond measure part of her wanted to tackle him to the ground and wail on him. The other part of her wanted to yell at him for not telling her earlier so she could have a shot at him. Still another part of her was disgusted with the other two parts.

_God I'm a mess_, she thought, her disgust and shame rising. _If you were still acting like that would _you _tell yourself about me or you or-_" and she shook her head irritated. She was glad that the rest of them had seen the writing on the wall after Danny's admission and promptly cleared out of the room, otherwise she probably would've hit someone, probably her erstwhile chief rival Sam.

"Are we going to talk or not, Paulina?" She heard Danny say. She looked at him, at the mingled pain, shame, pain, and regret that he wore on his face, and felt her anger ebb. The truth was, he had given her no real reason to be angry. Him not telling her was entirely logical and would've been the exact same thing she would've done in his place.

_Then why am I angry? _She thought as she looked at him at the realization that his handsome features transmuted easily to Danny Phantom's with a minimum of effort, and how thirty seconds of thinking outside the box would've led her, would've led _anyone _with a functioning brainstem to that conclusion. _There's the truth, I'm angry at myself for being so stupid as to not see the bloody fucking obvious staring me in the face, the dozen or so times it tried to get me to go out with him. _And that's another thing...

"Why didn't you tell me?"

Danny jolted, no doubt banishing some internal discussion of his own. "What do you mean?"

"Why didn't you tell me?" She repeated. "It was no secret you had a serious crush on me. You could've had me lock, stock, and barrel as soon as you demonstrated who and what you were."

Danny smirked derisvely before fixing her with a sudden cold stare. "And would it have been real? Or would you have coveted the fact that you had _Danny Phantom, _and cared only for my looks, the ego boost, and securing a dominant position in those ridiculous power struggles it would've given you."

Paulina flinched in shame.

"That answers my question," Danny said hard. "Look," he said, the suddenly softer tone in his voice causing him to look back at him. "Did I consider telling you in order to get you? Of course I did. I'm not perfect, Paulina, of course I did. Not only would I have gained you, I would've at last secured my position out of the nameless rabble of victims. In other words, for all the wrong reasons." He shook his head. "I wanted you, yes, but I wanted _you, _ not that social barracuda bitch that the high school environment seems to foster."

Paulina stared at him in disbelief. _He couldn't have thought about me _that. _At fourteen to fifteen?_ And before she could stop herself she blurted out. "Don't bullshit me Danny, you were a fourteen-year-old boy, you really expect me to believe that you wanted more out of a relationship with me than my body. I was...quite developed even then, and then as now, all I have to do was wear the appropriate clothing and every male at that school who wasn't a full time teacher would've been lining up to try to get in my pants."

Danny glared at her again. "I was _never _that shallow," he said, that hard coldness on his voice again. "It's a myth that young people are incapable of genuine feelings of that nature. All too many people internalize that belief that we only care about screwing in the backseat of the car, but it's just that, a myth. Yes, I genuinely had feelings for you. And do you want to know why?"

Paulina scoffed. "I would _love_ to hear this."

Danny sighed. "It's because you have all the traits I look for in a woman. You're smart, strong, independent, willing to fight for what she wants. It's what's always attracted me in a woman." He smirked as he apparently realized what he was saying. "Granted, I think I'm just proving the old saw about children looking for elements of the opposite-gender parent in their potential mates, but be that as it may, it's the truth. If you had been one of the simpering shrieking violets who only cared about their looks and had all the personality of a shoelace I wouldn't have looked at you twice. It's why I am in many ways still attracted to you and Valerie, it's part of the reason I love Sam, and it's why I didn't tell you. I mean aside from my secret being as safe with you as a crawdad living in a gumbo shack at the time."

Paulina stood there, stunned into silence. Not at the admission that Danny was still attracted to her. That was human nature: men and women didn't cease sizing up potential mates just because they were in a relationhip, _no one's _sexuality was focused solely around their current romantic partner. It was that he had genuinely wanted more from her even then that had stunned her to the core, that and a sudden surge of irritation that Sam was sitting on someone who suddenly looked appealing to her.

_Oh, no,_ Paulina snapped to herself. _You are _not _making a play for a man who's in a relationship already. Not again. Unless they decide to adopt an open relationship format, and the odds of Sam signing off on _that_ are about as big as this station being taken down with a pellet gun. No, best put that out of my mind now._ She sighed, shamed by her outburst towards Danny.

"I'm sorry, Danny. I had no idea."

Danny nodded, a wan smile appearing on his face. "It's okay."

Paulina sighed and leaned back in her chair again. "And for that matter, I _do _understand why you couldn't tell me." She smiled despite herself. "And thank you. For trusting me enough to tell me now."

The smile on Danny's face warmed at her words.

Paulina sat back in her chair. "Now I believe we have some sort of armed force to build."


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter Five

"A feeling of sadness and longing,  
That is not akin to pain,  
And resembles sorrow only  
As the mist resembles the rain."

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, _The Day is Done_, Stanza 3.

Valerie Gray stood under the awning above the front door to Romano's Italian Eatery. The young woman, skin barely half a shade lighter than the black leather jacket she clutched to her person, shivered. She shivered both against the fall chill that tried to worm her way past her jacket and the cold sadness that seeped out of her heart. She sighed. _I don't have to be out here, you know_, she thought to herself. _You can just go back to your apartment._ She shook her head in irritation._ Valerie Ariana Gray has never run from anything in her entire life and she's not going to start now by running away from the stuff I enjoy. _She looked through the window at the dark-haired, blue-eyed boy waiting patiently at the same booth near a window they'd eaten at every week for over a year now.

She sighed as she thought of the man who occupied an…interesting place in her thoughts. On the one hand he was very much her best friend and had been for the past year. They owed each other their lives a dozen times over now that they were actually working together as they always should have, instead of fighting each other. On the other, she still regretted how their abortive romance had ended, and her feelings for him in _that _area were…uncertain at best. Not that she intended to push the issue. Whatever lingering feelings that still existed between them from that era, the fact that he and Sam were in love was obvious, and she was not going to be able to address them anytime soon.

Her stomach rumbled abruptly. _And standing here getting increasingly cold isn't putting any food in my belly any faster. _She pushed through the glass door into the dimly-lit restaurant.

Her nostrils were immediately assaulted by the smell of freshly-baked focaccia, cooking meat, melted cheese and tomato coming at her from all directions, all of which only served to have her walking down the row of booths lining the window. She came upon Danny sitting in the right-hand seat, gnawing his way through the bread.

"Filling up on bread again, I see?" She said with a smirk. He never could resist freshly baked breads. More to the point though, neither could she so she met Danny's irritated, playful glare with one of her own, grabbed a bit of bread, dipped it in olive oil and sat down.

An hour later Danny was finishing off some chicken with olives while she was eating her way through milk-braised pork when Danny settled back. Despite herself, she found herself saying, "I miss us, what we used to do."

Danny sat forward, a concerned look on his face. "We can build you a new suit you know. It won't be as…advanced as the original, and you can't just make it appear with your mind, but the Red Huntress can fly again if she so chooses."

"I'd like that," she said, a brief smile appearing on her face before disappearing just as quickly. "But I'd be flying solo again and those days are over, and have been for a long time. Besides, you need me to help run this force we're building."

Danny rolled his eyes. "Oh, you mean the force that only exists in our minds. This isn't a TV show, Val, we can't just get together to form some sort of action squad of moody aggressive young people and somehow come on top with zero training formal or otherwise. It's going to have to take the form of at least something vaguely resembling a real-world military or paramilitary organization, or law-enforcement agency, and despite what you see on TV, by its very nature it's going to be ninety percent paperwork and training. I mean we can do it, it's going to be difficult as hell because we're starting from scratch with zero experience and only theoretical knowledge we can glean from books and the experiences of_ other people_, but it can be done."

He leaned forward again. "Doing so requires that we actually decide on some sort of force structure, and whatever else happened topside, that didn't happen. We just…stalled out."

She sighed, remembering the headache that had come around three, and the urge to start punching people in the face that had hit at hour six. The general structure seemed to be to build something from video games, an elite force of ghost hunters that could respond to threats around the world at a moment's notice, possibly from, and this was the wording Tucker had used, "some sort of badass dropship" . Despite appearances…planning hadn't been as easy as it sounded, and eventually they had tabled the issue and everyone had gone home with nothing being really decided.

Maddie though, had looked thoughtful, and when she'd pressed, she'd waved her off, saying she'd discuss it with Jack and get back to them.

"Goddamn the Guys in White," Danny said from across from her. "Goddamn them to hell for forcing us to go through this." He shook his head. "Right before I was knocked out, the last image I had was a woman in GIW armor who kicked Sam in the stomach and tazed her with a smile on her face." His blue eyes darkened in naked fury. "That woman is dog meat if I see her again. Her government agent status won't help her in a dark alley."

Another woman would have quailed at the thought of a man as tall and muscular as him offering physical violence to a woman. They would have assumed that he saw women as beneath him and hit them out of a total lack of respect, and cast worrying glances at Sam to boot. In reality though, probably due to his formidable mother, there wasn't a misogynistic bone in his entire body. He simply didn't believe that people should be treated any different solely because of their reproductive organs, and that extended to fighting. He didn't hit a woman who angered him simply because he didn't go around hitting people in general just because they pissed him off. Finally since he'd never subscribed to the notion that women were "purer" by nature and only engaged in criminal behavior under male influence, taking apart Ember and Kitty with his fists hadn't caused him to lose any sleep.

Pissing him off in general was one thing though. Offering violence to his loved ones however…

_Besides, whoever could hit someone after she's down just to get her jollies deserves it. Unfortunately it's not likely we'll encounter her again. Then again though, it's the thought that counts._

She stared at her friend and, with perfect sincerity, said. "We'll smack her around together, Danny."

Valerie sighed she walked, alone down the street back to her apartment, her eyes on the sky above, wishing she was above the rooftops once more. From the looks of it, in this area at least she'd have the skies to herself. Apart from a lone police speeder off in the distance, it was clear.

_Come to think of it, I probably wouldn't mind having a suit again for recreational purposes only. I'll probably stick to the ground during most of my fighting now a days. _Then she thought of the last time she had a run-in with Skulker. _And then again I'll probably eat those words at some point. Though without his powers, Skulker probably won't be too interested in adding Danny's pelt to his collection anytime soon._

"Psst," a voice from the alleyway they were walking across. Valerie stood and stared at the shadowy figure that had the rough figure of an adult female human, "Samantha Manson?"

"Wrong melanin levels in skin, wrong side of town," Valerie said as she folded her arms under her breasts. "I'm Valerie Gray. What do you want?"

She emerged from the shadows to reveal a lanky woman in her mid-twenties, roughly her height, with light brown hair. "Close enough." The woman said, a trace of a Jersey accent on her voice. "My name, Miss Gray, is not important. What's important is that you listen to what I have to tell you."

She cocked her head, her hand going to the sidearm she kept to protect herself from humans, a Desert Eagle. "And that is?" As she sidled closer to the woman in front of her

"I am, or rather I _was, _an agent of the Ecto-Control Agency, more commonly, and disparagingly, known as the Guys In White. I was assigned to their field office in Albuquerque when you were brought in."

Valerie moved very, _very _fast. One moment she was standing four feet from her, the next she'd closed the gap between them, knocked her back into the shadows and slammed her back into the wall. Her hand closed in a vice like grip on the older woman's throat.

"You have thirty seconds to convince me you're not luring me into a trap," she said, as she slid her gun out of her holster and thrust it under her chin. "Or I'll just shoot you and take the life in prison."

"You don't have any powers anymore," she said, half gagging due to the hand squeezed around her throat. "Under normal circumstances, we, _they _would leave you alone, but that's before you were abducted."

She relaxed her grip slightly, but kept the barrel of the gun pressed to her chin, conceding the point, but not the issue. "What I came to tell you is that there's something very wrong inside the ECA, and what happened to you, Mister Fenton, and Miss Fenton is proof of that."

"Yeah," she said darkly. "You're organization exists to begin with."

"There was a time I would have disagreed with you, but _now_." She shook her head. "What happened to you three was completely irregular, and completely illegal. You should at the very least have been hauled before a judge before what they did to you. Aside from that, an operation of the magnitude of the one that was lost required the approval of both the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security, and neither was informed or aware of an operation that big until after it was already over. It originated entirely from within the ECA without any approval or knowledge of the rest of the government. Have you heard any government spokesmen on the news talking about it either to confirm or deny it?"

"No," she said, as a matter of fact there had been _no _one from the ECA, Homeland Security or Justice talking about it. The pundits on both sides of the aisle were, perhaps miraculously, united on the issue. Everyone had damn near had heart spasms and were still frothing at the mouth for answers as to why armed and armored ECA agents had raided two towns simultaneously and dragged off three people with absolutely no explanation. Part of that, though certainly not all perhaps was an outgrowth of just how badly the ECA had squandered any goodwill when it had suddenly became a genuine arm of the Federal government and not just a parking orbit where every other law enforcement agency had put its deadbeats with more family connections then competence since the Cold War. This included a fair amount of the "cowboy cops" men and women, who despite their glorification in the media, weren't kept around long in other law enforcement agencies for a _reason_. Suddenly they found themselves in charge, with a nigh-unlimited budget and advanced weapons. Not a good combination.

"There's a reason for that." She said coldly. "I don't know how precisely deep the rot goes, but you and your friends are still in danger. The fact that you're…encounter in New Mexico happened so soon after you were released from our custody was no accident. We will be in touch Miss Gray."

* * *

Danielle Fenton stared at the form on her desk, illuminated in the harsh tungsten glow of her desk lamp. Tapping her pen on her desk she looked at the words at the very top of the page. State of Hawaii Department of Health, Office of Health Status Monitoring. She swallowed, a revolted shame filling her at what she was about to do: step into a dead woman's shoes, an identity she was going to have to adopt as her own for the rest of her life. The woman who's life she was about to co-opt had been close enough to the same age at her death, six months shy of her eighteenth birthday, and if whatever genealogical information she'd been able to gather was accurate, a _very _distant niece of Jack. She didn't look much like that other woman. She had jet-black hair and the Danielle Fenton whose car had been sideswiped by a semi in Honolulu, taking her and her entire immediate family with it, had a very mousy shade of brown. Plus, she had been shorter than her by a good three inches, but those details were irrelevant. No state government cross-referenced requests for new birth certificates with death certificates.

And if the states didn't do that normally, the Social Security Administration (represented by the blue-highlighted form off to one side) certainly did not. She could state with near absolute certainty that barring some in-depth criminal investigation, her co-opting that woman's identity would go undetected until the day she died.

_Odds are good that I'll never feel clean again until the day I die to. _Her bleak musings that a young woman who just happened to share her name just happened to die mere days before the ECA came for her, were interrupted by a loud thumping sound on her door.

"Who is it?"

"Jazz."

"Come in." Her door opened, and she heard the older woman step into her room and the door close behind her.

"I was just about to go get a pizza before everyone starts closing down, want anything?"

She gave a pained sigh as the urge to discuss this situation with someone, _anyone_, coming upon her. "I'm not sure I can do this, Jasmine."

"Do what?" She said, concern on her voice.

"This," she said, shaking her head even as the tears began to collect behind her eye. "_Any _of this. By rights I should be three-years-old, and in bed, not a young woman with a body other women would kill for, getting ready to steal the identity of another young woman who died a horrible death along with her entire family, and preparing for a possible war against aliens who's motives we don't have the slightest clue about." She couldn't stop it anymore; the tears began to flow from her eyes. "I mean, I'm not saying I'm not willing and able to do this, and that even at my "official" age I wouldn't be as committed to this as anyone else, but just this once I wish I could be small child."

She heard Jasmine sigh, before seeing the red-head sit down on her bed. "We all feel like that at some point in our lives Danni. When the weight of the world is suddenly dumped on your shoulders, everyone wishes they could crawl back to their toys and let someone else handle the problem."

"Easy for you to say, you actually were a child once. Vlad, and the biologists with the ethics of chainsaws he suborned for this, created me from sperm they stole from Danny while he was unconscious during one of the periods he'd held him captive, and we still don't know where in hell she got her hand on Paulina'." She huffed derisively. "And if I was just _in vitro _I would have been fine, but they grew me from fertilized cell into puberty in a little over ten months. Then they exposed me to the ecto-energies to give me my powers before programming my brain like they were installing a computer's operating system. And I ask you now, what business does a _vat-grown freak_, who was created for the sole purpose of being a weapon to use against an innocent boy, have even _existing_, let alone stealing someone else's life."

"I can't imagine what you're feeling right now. Modern humanity has been around for two hundred thousand years, and in all that time you're the first human to have been grown whole cloth rather than born and live to tell about it. I can't imagine what it's like to wish not just that you had a normal childhood, but that you had a childhood at all. I can't help you with that unfortunately. But what I can say is that whatever else you are, you're not a 'vat-grown freak'. You're a wonderful, extremely intelligent, extremely bright young woman. And if the Danielle Fenton who died in Hawaii was _any _family of ours, she'd want you to… use those documents for a good cause."

"I keep telling myself that," Danielle said. "It's not working though."

"You don't have a choice. You're much more likely to get caught if you try to have an entirely fake birth certificate and SSN created. Once we have these we can 'legally' hire you and we can get on with the business of alien fighting."

Danielle let out a long sigh. _You knew she was going to say that, damn it. You just needed to hear her say it, and get those fears off your chest at least. _She picked up her pen, clicked it and begin filling out the appropriate information. "Thanks," she said, looking at her with genuine sincerity. "For the talk."

Jazz smiled. "Anytime," and headed for the door.

When she reached the door, Jazz stopped clearly just thinking about something. "Oh, I liked what you said earlier. About how George Washington was only twenty when he was appointed a regimental commander in the Virginia militia."

"It's true. He was a lieutenant colonel at nineteen and a colonel at twenty."

Jazz gave a worried hum. "As I recall he wasn't…particularly good starting out. That business at Fort Necessity comes to mind."

"That…wasn't one of his finer moments," she shuddered. _The man forgot you're supposed to fortify _high _ground, not low ground._ But he got better over the course of the French and Indian War."

"He still lost more battles than he won though," Jazz pointed out.

"He won the right battles at the right time," Danielle pointed out. "However, what allowed him to learn how to do that, was his life to date. He'd spent most that life observing and helping to run his family's plantation, and as a county surveyor, so by the time Dimwiddle appointed him a member of the Virginia militia he'd already had quite a few years of leadership experience under his belt. He was able to take his leadership experience and theoretical knowledge, and do what he needed to."

"And you really think we can do the same?"

"I'd stake my life on it," Danielle said, a vicious sort of pride filling her, washing away the self-loathing of the past hour. "I mean think about it. Danny put together a scratch force of people who detested him and with only a few hours of training was able to wipe the floor with Ember and Youngblood and get you and your parents off their ship. Sam commanded the Ops Center without which that plan never would have succeeded. Paulina participated in that action, and from what I can tell was a _very _effective leader for Casper High's spirit squads throughout her high school career. We have leadership experience, and we have something else he didn't have. Nearly three, nearly four, years of combat experience, _any _combat experience, below the regimental level. We have a shot in hell of pulling this off. So long as we learn what we need to. The aliens, and our usual enemies, won't know what hit them."

"Well," she said, "we'll certainly give it our all. Now, you wanted pepperoni?"

"Can I come with you?" Danielle said, the thought of that seizing her. "If I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it on a full stomach."

Jazz smiled. "Sure."


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter Six

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood,"

-Daniel Burnham

Daniel Fenton sighed as he sat one of the seats/storage bins of the Specter Speeder as it boosted through the space towards the Arctic_, _wondering just what was so urgent that his parents pulled him and Sam, and everyone else out of their beds, at five in the morning no less, and why they were heading out here. This meant he found himself stuck in the Speeder's with six other people in the cramped passenger compartment as his live-in girlfriend and his sister piloted the Speeder through orbital space.

_Still,_ he thought, as he watched Sam's hands play over the board. _I do enjoy watching her work, be it fighting ghosts or piloting, or, as frequently happens, both. _Yet and still, he couldn't help but notice the bags under her eyes. One of the consequences of spending a night knowing someone "in the Biblical sense" was it left both people quite tired enjoyment aside. They were both tired, but he wasn't the one flying the aircraft. Luckily Sam's (and, incidentally, his sister's) skill as a pilot was phenomenal, however, and he had no doubts that they'd get to wherever they were going on _Hephaistos _in one piece.

He turned to look at Valerie, the dark-skinned woman was staring at the deck plating, something obviously consuming her thoughts. He was concerned about what, precisely that was. Under any other circumstances, he'd wonder if those lingering feelings he knew she still had for him were getting to her again. Danny could hardly blame her, he didn't like how that had ended between them either and a small part of him wished they could have let that relationship run its course normally. It almost certainly would have ended sooner rather than later, but it would have been a "natural" ending, not one foisted upon them by the demands of their double life and had hurt them both, far more than either of them cared to admit.

However, there was something to that. On the exceedingly rare occasions she dwelled on those feelings, she deliberately pretended nothing was wrong. That she wasn't doing.

_Something's happened or she's learned something, something so disturbing she's hesitant to inform the rest of us._

He opened his mouth to ask what was wrong, when he heard Danielle's voice come in from behind him. "So, Sam," she said, looking up from the copy of the _Iliad _she was reading to pass the time. "Have any idea where we're going."

"Nope," Sam said, drawing out the N slightly. "I'm just following the nav beacon Maddie told me to follow."

"I do wonder why they're being so secretive about all this though," Paulina chirped up suddenly. She looked over at him. "No offense to you and Jazz, but your parents seemed to be the type of people who would have had difficulty restraining themselves from revealing something so big they couldn't even tell us over an ostensibly secure link."

"I agree," he began, only to be interrupted when both Sam and Jazz's consoles began beeping frantically in a simultaneous panic attack.

"What is it," Danny ordered sharply.

"Stand by," Jazz said. "Holy _shit_."

Danny's eyes widened. Jazz didn't swear that often, and she only rarely used swears stronger than damn. Danny slid off his seat and walked over to the ECO station to peer over Jazz's shoulder. It was at that point he saw the radar return she'd seen. His eyes widened. There was a docking berth out there, thousands of miles from _Hephaistos. _Th ship in that docking berth was massive, just over a mile long.

"Jazz, Jazz, are we far enough out still to get the whole thing on one of the telescopes?"

Jazz froze as if she hadn't heard him for a moment, then shook herself violently and tapped a button on her console. "Yes," she said. She entered the relevant commands and the digitized image, gathered with the latest-generation optical telescopes filled up the navigational display. He heard feet crossing the short distance as Paulina, Tucker, Danielle, and Starr converged behind him to view the display, their shocked intakes of breath seeming to come in at once.

The radar return certainly had suggested the profile, but there was a difference between seeing a radar return, and seeing the object responsible for the radar return in an image constructed from visible light. Her hull was wedge shaped vaguely reminiscent of an Imperial Star Destroyer but lacking the distinctive conning tower protruding from her aft section, and the three or four other decks that struck out like sore thumbs from the primary hull. Tucker leaned forward, staring at the row of massive double-barreled gun batteries that just appeared on the smooth armored hull in the refreshed image.

"Are those," the former mayor of Amity Park began his tone incredulous, "gun batteries?"  
"Looks like," Sam said from her station. "But are they conventional weapons or anti-ghost?"

"Does it matter?" Tucker responded. "Not even a ghost could survive a hit from one of those mothers, in our realm or theirs"

"Can you imagine what it would cost to operate even one of those ships for an extended amount of time?" Dani said. "And we're not even talking about supplies, but the crew? Not even the most sophisticated automation system we have could run a ship that big without an obscenely large crew to operate and maintain its systems, not to mention the million and one other things a warship's crew finds itself doing.."

"I agree," Danny said, shaking himself enough to actually be able to talk. "It would be in the thousands at least."

"About ten thousand I'd wager," Sam said, awe on her voice. "When that ship is fully crewed and manned she'll be like a small town in space."

"Um, guys," Starr said, the suspicious tone on her voice of someone who realized something no one else seemed to be considering. "Can you imagine how long it must have taken to build her? I mean you're parents are good, but to throw together _that _in twenty-four hours is impossible even for them."

_Shit_, Danny said, shocked, and wanting to yell at his parents for building something that awesomely cool and not tell him about it. _They must've have been working on that project for over a year, and didn't breathe a word about it to anyone._

Sam's board rang abruptly. "We're being hailed," Sam said. "It's coming from that ship out there, and it's your parents."

"Are we within real-time range?"

Sam looked at one of the many navigational displays on the starboard bulkhead. Finally after a few moments she nodded. "Unless God's changed the rules on us in the past few minutes, then yes."

"All right, punch it up on the speakers," Danny said.

Sam nodded and ran her hands over her board.

"Hey, Danny," Jack Fenton's usual exuberant voice flooded over them. "So, how do you like our little pet project?"

"'Pet project?,'" everyone said in response to what had to be the understatement of the millennium.

"Yes of course it's a pet project," he heard his sister say dryly. "Spending billions of dollars is normal for things like that. Haven't you heard?"

* * *

Danny couldn't help but stare around him as he walked through the darkened corridors of the ship behind his parents, both of whom were turns pointing out rooms and other ways as they winded their way from the starboard docking bay on what was presumably a tour of the ship. He sighed, shaking his head, in both annoyance at the fact that they weren't actually explaining why they built her in the first place, and affection over the fact that he enjoyed seeing his parents happy, and they were always happiest talking about their work.

_All she needs is some sort of FTL capability and she'd be perfect, _she thought. _Unfortunately not even Vlad and his research teams came up with that. Least so far as the members the FBI and MI5 rounded up in the sweep of all his enterprises after his attempt to take over the world failed. Some of them are still fugitives, having no doubt crawled into the deepest and darkest hole they can find. Including all the scientists we're sure were involved in growing Danielle and destroying or taking the records about her before the British closed in._

"…we're estimating once she's fully crewed and operational she'll need a crew of about ten thousand," Jack said blithely, as if that were the most normal thing in the world, even in an era of advanced, economical spaceflight. Danny sighed. They needed answers, and more than the ones they'd been providing.

"That's all well and good," Danny found himself saying. "Now perhaps you could explain why you built it and why you built it without informing us."

Jack and Maddie looked over at him, their face's having the decency to redden at the very least as they were reminded of their out of character duplicity.

"Let's discuss this somewhere else," Maddie said after a minute. "The conference room is this way."

"Let me get this straight," Danny said, staring incredulously at his parents in the conference room that, as far as she could tell, was the duplicate right down to the carpeting of the one on _Hephaistos_. They were sitting around the u-shaped table. "You didn't tell us about one of the most important engineering projects in human history because you didn't want to get us distracted from _ghost-hunting_?!"

"Times were tense there for a while," Maddie said. "We couldn't risk bringing you in on this when there was a major ghost attack every other week."

"Times are tense _now_," Sam said from next to him, giving an all-encompassing wave to Danny and Valerie, "I'm still expecting Aragon or Walker to take advantage over the fact that we've effectively lost our heavy hitters."

Danny bristled, somewhat irrationally, at the slight barb, and made to put his hand on Valerie's shoulder to keep his fiery, argumentative friend from exploding at his girlfriend. His eyes widened when his hand didn't end up on Valerie's shoulder pushing her back into her seat. She looked over to see, to his surprise, and mounting terror, that she was sitting in her seat, playing with the capped pen in front of her. Clearly lost in her own world. A bigger contrast from the usually diligent, passionate, hyper-focused Valerie Gray that had wormed her way into the hearts of everyone in the room he couldn't imagine.

"And that's another thing," he heard Sam say. "You know the United States is signatory to those treaties preventing the militarization of space. I'm fairly sure this is a pretty big breach of that. Granted, I've test flown those experimental space fighters of yours so I'm not going to hypocritically defend the treaty despite the fact that I'm already party to violating it, but this is just flat out abandoning the treaty entirely."

"That treaty's days of preventing space militarization were numbered," Maddie pointed out sharply, " and the spirit of that treaty was pretty much broken as soon as-,"

"Everyone be quiet!" Danny suddenly shouted, his voice breaking over everyone else's, also serving to knock Valerie out of whatever reverie she was in. When everyone's voices had died down and they'd all turned to stare at Danny with annoyed looks on their faces, he managed to ask, "Something you want to tell us, Val?"

She saw Valerie take a deep breath. "Last night when I was walking home from dinner…"

* * *

"God," Paulina heard Sam say softly. "Sweet merciful God is this true Val?"

In all the years they'd known each other, even when they've, rather ridiculously, been on opposite sides, she'd never seen Sam with her face drained of all color like that. She'd seen her enraged beyond all measure yes, even momentarily terrified during ghost attacks, though she quickly hid it from her face in order to get her job done, but never scared to the bone.

Then again, she'd never seen her when someone had taken a sledgehammer to how she saw the world, to how everyone in the room understood the world.

"Did she actually say that, Val?" Danny said, picking up Sam's thread.

"She said that our meeting that alien in New Mexico was no accident, Danny," Valerie pointed out. "There's really only one way to interpret that statement."

"I doubt it's quite that…cartoony," Starr said suddenly. When everyone stared at her, she continued, "I mean, I'm sure they're colluding with the enemy, but I'm not at all of the opinion they're colluding with them knowingly. Not unless they've all forgotten what species they are."

"I agree with her that is stupid," Danni said. "The only thing I can see them doing is exploiting popular sentiment against ghosts for some sort of massive uprising."

"And while they're doing that these aliens swoop in and gobble us up while we're busy slitting each others throats," Starr responded grimly.

"You two read a lot of political and spy thrillers, don't you," Sam asked pointedly, it wasn't a question.

"Oh, yeah," his cousin responded from her seat while Starr nodded vigorously next to her. _That's true,_ she thought. Starr read voraciously when she had the chance, but the science fiction and spy genres held special places in her heart.

"Figures," Danny said. "I'm not saying you're wrong though," he put in hastily at his cousin, who was looking like she was about to snap at him. "In fact, tend to agree with you. The question is, what are we going to do about it?"

Silence descended upon the room. Paulina leaned back in her chair. "That's the million-dollar question isn't it?" She said softly as she fought to keep her hands from shaking as she thought of what could happen, of the civil wars, the _world_ war, that would divide and ravage humanity right when it needed to unite the most. "What do we do about it?"

"We get this ship up and running," Danny said with a voice that could blister steel. "That's what we do."

"This ship'll need a crew," Paulina found herself saying a second later. "But there's the problem. This isn't the Age of Sail, where you could dredge up untrained people off the street and have them learn by doing. We're not just going to be able to pick up random people and be reasonably sure they can learn the care and maintenance of a fusion reactor if we shriek at them long enough."

"I understand that," Danny said. "It will take quite a while before she's fully operational if we train a crew as large as the one this ship will require largely from scratch. Not that we won't put priority on absorbing as many former military and current ghost hunters as we can, of course. "

Paulina sighed. She'd been waiting for this. Her one previous mission had relied mostly on skills she already possessed to begin with, and they weren't all that good. Oh, sure, she had basic technology skills, most people did, but there was a world of difference between being able to touch type and running a ship such as this. Or hitting a skeleton with a stick and being a ghost hunter.

Or being a soldier, as she had the distinct sensation that the "soldier" aspects of her new career were about to become dominant relatively quickly. _Nothing wrong with being a soldier though_, _it just wasn't what I had in mind coming in._

Paulina could see the same realization playing itself out on the faces of everyone else. She sighed. "Which," she said aloud, "by definition, would include us."

Valerie made to open her mouth before the realization that, compared to them she didn't know jack about this career came over her.

"It'll take a bit before we can establish a system to recruit large numbers of people quickly," Danny said, leaning back in his chair. "We are however, more than equipped to start training people in small groups, and we should."

_Therein lies the rub, _she thought. _What, specifically are we going to be trained _for? Ghost hunting wasn't just going to be about running around shooting up things anymore, if it ever was to begin with. Even the "youth hunter groups" which had sprung up like dandelions after the Antarctica crisis (and states lowering the minimum age for ghost hunting, in, she suspected, in recognition of her newfound friend's achievements) had started specializing in various areas as soon as they realized just what it took to be genuinely effective over the long-term.

An idea occurred to her though. It would be a waste of time to just focus on the two of them for starters. Even if the aliens and the rogue GIW elements were willing to wait before they did anything else major, the ghosts were not going to be minding their own business forever. Sooner or later someone in the constantly seething mire of political alliances that made up the Ghost Zone was going to attack the human world. When that happened, it'd be better if it wasn't just the nine of them. Hell it was something of a minor miracle that the _four _of them had managed to contain and repel the threats they'd faced, even with superpowers. She thought she had a solution though.

"Out of curiosity," she asked. 'Define 'small groups.'"

"Well," Sam said. "We were thinking about twenty to twenty-four at any given time?" She gave her a quizzical look. "Why?"

"I was thinking," Paulina said. "We could start out by trying to sign up the rest of the people who fought with you two against Youngblood. I like to think we did a good job considering are lack of skills, imagine what you can do once you have us trained." _That's assuming we can get them of course._

Danny seemed to be thinking the same thing. "If you think you can get them onboard then fine," he said, nodding. "Well, we have a lot of stuff to work out, all of which we shouldn't worry about right this second. Let's return to the surface, get something to eat and-,"

"Excuse me, Danny but there's one last thing we should bring up," Maddie said suddenly, from where she'd been sitting, not moving for the past few minutes. "We need to be absolutely clear on something _right now_. What you're about to face now is going to be unlike any threat you've ever dealt. The human race, if even half of what Val's contact said is true, is about to face a threat unlike any we've ever faced. If you have any hope, any hope at all, of surviving this, and making a difference, you can't just ally temporarily until the threat has passed and then all go your separate ways. "The continuation of a quarter million years of human existence depends on this alliance becoming permanent. You must not only come together, but _stay _together to whatever end awaits you all."

"I'd second that," Danielle said. "And if history has taught us anything is that this will exact a heavy price, not in money but in our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."


	7. Chapter 7

A/N: Yes, their characters of Beatrix Tang and Margaret Potter are Trixie and Molly from Fairly OddParents, and their two of the main characters in the Old, Unhappy, Far-Off Things side story.

Chapter Seven

"I never give them hell- I just tell them the truth and they think it is hell."

-Harry Truman

_Three Months Later_

Paulina Ortega's eyes fluttered open, staring at the patterns on the wooden ceiling. She sighed, still feeling sand and grit in her eyes, the soreness of her limbs, and rolled back over, closing her eyes. She wanted to fall back asleep, desperately. The last three months of training Danny and Sam had put her through had been tiring, to say the least. But, it had been fulfilling, in so many other ways which is why she stayed in. Particularly when she got to fly. The warplanes which Mister and Mrs. Fenton called, for whatever reason, FrightFighters, incorporated the very latest in the aerospace technology either they had developed themselves, or the technology of Vlad Masters that had been bequeathed to them (along with DALV, what remained of Masters' corporations, and Axion Labs) by the government in the court proceedings.

She was still amazed at just how many technological advancements that the Fentons and Vlad Masters had managed to advance between them…and how, for some reason neither thought of marketing their stuff until very recently. She could forgive the Fentons, they were 'eggheads' par excellence and had been too absorbed with ghost hunting to consider the wider applications for their technology. She couldn't understand Vlad, and, why, instead of marketing his technology, he'd used it and his powers to rob banks, commit investor fraud, and try to destroy the Fentons. Why it never occurred to him to market his technologically legitimately and destroy the Fentons was one of those mysteries of the human condition that would never be solved.

_Not that I wouldn't gladly take apart anyone who hurt my friends, _she thought to herself. _Especially Danny. _She sighed. Just mentioning his name still caused her heart to flutter after three months, and, along with it, a tide of shame as she thought of those lost years where she'd sacrificed her integrity on the altar of popularity.

_Which is why I'm here, to spend the rest of my life making up for it, _she thought to herself. She glanced over at the clock, glowing 7:00 in large numbers. _In three more hours. _And rolled back over.

She was just slipping back to sleep when the grating sound of a cellphone on vibrate on a solid surface cut through the dark like a chainsaw. Giving an annoyed grunt, she rolled back over and grabbed the phone off the nightstand.

The text message from Danny was simple and to the point. "_Meet me in Lincoln Park 7:30. Important information.._

Paulina's eyes narrowed._ Why would he want to meet me in the park?_ The one hundred and sixty-seven acre park, containing among other things a zoo and an amusement park was a good mile and a half down the road from his house. _Though if something major happened, he might not want to lead whatever enemy force he ran into back there, at least not yet. But wait, we have protocols for that. Nothing for it though..._

Sighing, she yanked herself out of the bed and slid out of her nightgown, letting it fall to the floor as she walked over to her dresser. Opening it, she began pulling out the components of her individually tailored uniform. The first to go on were dark, space-black trousers, with a green stripe running up the outer right leg, followed by the white blouse. Finally she slid reached into her closet and pulled the black, double-breasted tunic off the hanger and slid into it. Finally she turned to admire herself in the mirror. The black tunic buttoned to the right, and green piping lined the piping to the right. It was also slightly wasp wasted, and had a longer than average skirt which fell to the upper thigh.

But what really drew her eyes were the rank insignia on her shoulder boards and on the pips on her collar. Two bright silver bars on each green shoulder board, followed by two silver rectangular pips on the right side of her collar, signifying her rank as Lieutenant in the ship's company, with the wings of an, albeit provisionally, certified fighter pilot, under the wings representing her FAA certification as an ostensibly civilian astronaut . Paulina sighed, for therein lay the serious problem: the lack of experienced officers in most areas, especially fighter pilots. A lot of the ghost hunters they were focusing on recruiting and training first had pilot training, but as _Speeder _pilots. Fighter pilots outside test ranges had still until extremely recently been the sole domain of the armed forces, and virtually all of them were unavailable for a variety of reasons. So, here she was, a squadron leader. In a squadron that was just as inexperienced as she was at the job they were theoretically supposed to be doing, and wasn't even half-formed yet to boot. True, she had plenty of leadership experience of a sort, she'd naturally taken the lead role in her circle of friends as far back as she could remember, and everyone said she'd been an excellent cheer captain. But leadership in varsity cheerleading and leadership as the commanding officer of a fighter squadron still in the process of working up were two entirely _different_ things, even if the basic principles remained the same.

_Still though, _she thought to herself, even as her own anxiety wormed it's way out of her chest. _For what it's worth, there _is _no one else available to fill my position, and I'm only the leader of one squadron. There are five others, and Jazz is in overall command of all of us. And it's not going to stop me from doing the very best I possibly can under the circumstances._

She sighed, thought about it, and buckled on her belt, carrying her holster and sidearm, which she figured she'd sorely need if her feelings on this whole park meeting turned out to be as accurate as she prayed they weren't.

When she'd gotten it on comfortably, she took one last look in the mirror, and couldn't help but smile. _Whatever else this uniform means, I do clean up good in it. Even Danny's made appreciative comments about me in uniform. _Then her heart sank slightly. _If only playfully with no intent behind them._

She shook her head, she could pine away for Danny until she met someone else or until the increasingly hypothetical day that he started a relationship with her later. _Time to do your job _now_, Lieutenant, _she thought to herself, before grabbing her black beret off the dresser, fixing it on her head, and walked out her bedroom door, closing it behind her.

* * *

Danielle Fenton yawned as she walked down the empty corridor on the still mostly empty corridor of the _Wrath Of Achilles. _ She smiled as she thought of the ship's name, and that she had suggested it herself, from the very first line of one of her favorite works despite its acknowledged age, _The Iliad_. _Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus…_ , she thought to herself, a smile on her face. _The Iliad _had been the first book she'd ever read, being on her shelf the first day she'd woken up with what she thought was no memory of who she was. Being alone in the bedroom Vlad had put her in to finally allow her to wake up after the months of accelerated growth and neural and psychological programming, she'd wandered over to the bookshelf and started reading, waiting for her parents or guardian or a doctor to show up and tell her what was going on.

_Of course, _she thought, _it was only later that it turned out that I'd never had a childhood to begin with._ When she left Vlad behind, and did a number on his cloning labs for good measure, the first thing she'd "liberated" from her old bedroom was her copies of _The Iliad _and _The Odyssey._ They were the only things Vlad had introduced her to worth holding on to.

_And now, _she thought as she made her way to the living quarters in the ship's Marine Country, _his business empire is now in the hands of the people whom he made suffer the most, and they're using it to change the world. _She thought to herself, not helping but smile. The quantum leaps in medical technology that Vlad had misused in his vendetta against the Fentons by creating her were now being used to grow organs for transplant. Organs that would never be rejected because they were copies in every way of the organs they were replacing, and making it likely that organ rejection and graft-versus-host disease would be things of the past inside a generation. People no longer had to go through their life with artificial limbs or no limbs, for any limbs that were lost, assuming the unlucky person survived losing them, could be regrown from scratch and surgically reattached.

She finally turned the corridor to see the door to one of the officer's quarters open into the corridor. She looked into see the two women she expected to see there.

The first one was the woman she'd come there to see. Beatrix Tang, _Second Lieutenant _Beatrix Tang, was one of her platoon companies in her half formed company that would make up what passed for an organic marine infantry regiment aboard ship. They were the ones who would do the lion's share of the ground fighting with ghosts (and aliens) once they were ready for active operations. As well as be expected to take on an increasingly rogue Guys in White if and when they finally dropped all pretense of loyalty to the United States.

The raven-haired platoon commander was a tough, no-nonsense young woman. Olive-skinned, epicanthic folds on her eyes, and long black hair pulled back into a bun, that combined with her attractive figure and made her popular with her male counterparts. Which was a moot point as she was already in a relationship with one of the ship's fighter pilots, had been for long before they ever signed on.

_Speaking of fighter pilots,_ she thought to herself, looking at her platoon commander's guest, shooting her a mixture of mingled respect and irritation.

Ensign Margaret Potter, callsign Athena, known by her friends by the diminutive Molly, was of middling height (which was rapidly becoming the norm for fighter pilots, as women and smaller men could take gees better) was another one of Molly's friends from the brief ghost hunting group they'd formed out in California that had lasted for more than a few weeks before they'd applied to join FentonWork's rapidly expanding ghost/fighting-military arm. Fair skinned, with black hair, and dark eyes, and cutting an attractive figure of her own, she bore an astonishingly physical resemblance to Danielle herself.

In more ways than one, as she recognized at last her equal as an amateur historian. Now if only they weren't diametrically opposed on so many issues _regarding_ history.

She shook those annoying thoughts from her head, as both women noticed her and came to attention. Nodding courteously to Molly, she turned to Beatrix.

"Lieutenant," she said. "Something's come up, we're going to Lincoln Park, and I want your platoon to provide security."

Trixie nodded, a eager, and predatory smile breaking out on her face. "Yes, sir, we'll be ready for anything, sir."

Danielle smiled. She'd received extremely high marks on all her tests when, as a previously established ghost hunter, she'd been tested to see if she could go through accelerated training, and seeing how she trained with her platoon, she could believe it.

_Good, _she thought to herself, feeling a twinge of anxiety. _Because I have a bad feeling about this. I hope I'm wrong about needing them, one can't always be right about this, but _still.

* * *

Danny sighed as he brought his Jeep Grand Cherokee to a stop on the curb, his anxiety building even as he and Sam got out of the driver and passenger seat's respectively. The text, had come from Valerie, who'd claimed to have discovered some new information about their respective enemies, but didn't want to go to him directly, but instead meet him in the park.

The sound of wheels on pavement behind him drew his attention, and turned to see Valerie's Dodge Ram pull up to the curb. He watched his dark-skinned friend, clad in the inverted uniform of black blouse, green tunic and trousers, and a white stripe up the leg to distinguish her as a member of the ship's marine company, get out of the driver's seat. Then her words floored him.

"All right, Sam," she said, her arms folded under her breasts. "What's this about?"

Sam's eyes widened and she turned to give Danny and them both annoyed stares.

"Me?" She said. "We're out here because of a message you sent us."

Valerie's brow furrowed. "Me? I'm out here because of a message you sent us."

Another car pulled up next to them. Jazz's gray Ford Expedition pulled up to the curb, followed closely by Paulina and Starr's Ford Tauruses . As Jazz, Paulina and Starr stepped out of their respective cars, he held up his hand to forestall the questions they were going to ask.

"All right, it's clear some third party lured us out here," Danny said. "But for what?"

"You can say that again," another voice said from behind him, and he turned to see Danielle standing behind her, with two privates, a man and a woman, armed, and in full body armor. She shook her head. "I don't know what disturbs me more," she said, giving them faintly annoyed looks. "The fact that we were all lured out here, or the fact that out of all of us I was the only one smart enough to think to bring backup."

Danny's face heated. _I should have thought of that,_ he thought to himself. _But it was only three months ago that the backup I needed was Tucker, Sam and Valerie. This whole 'military' thing is foreign to me still, though I'll adapt. _

Danielle, on the other hand, had spent the past three years facing situations like this on her own, and surviving by her own wits and courage. She saw the value of sufficient amounts of armed backup.

"Well," Danny said, sighing and recovering himself. "Is there anyone out there?"

The young marine captain nodded. "One woman. Say in her mid-forties, about your mother's approximate height but a much thinner build, sitting on one of the swings in the playground. There's no one else out there except for us."

"Then by all means let us go talk to her," he said. "She took the trouble to lure us all out here, it must be something important."

At that moment, Tucker's Honda Civic pulled up to the curb, and the former mayor of Amity Park stepped out of the car. "So, Danny, what is it you wanted to see us about?"

The woman, he noticed, was indeed of her mother's rough height and build, though she noticed that there was considerably less weight on her than on her mother, and not within the range for healthy adults either. This was the look of someone who wasn't eating right due to her circumstances, not someone who was slender due to genetics. But there was something about that face. It looked familiar.

"Ma'am?" He said, looking at her curiously.

"Ah," she said, a Czech accent on her voice. "So, that device my friend gave to me works."

It was the accent, combined with the face that apparently clinched it for _someone_ for Danny heardTucker hiss in surprise from behind him.

"Rusalka Zelenkova," Tucker said, shock and disgust. "As I live and breathe."

Danny turned to look at him. "Who?"

"A biologist, late of Charles University in Prague," he said softly. "She kind of dropped off the radar for a little while. Apparently, both Charles University and the Czech government didn't approve over much of her attempts to resolve all the problems with viable cloning of humans. Which makes her the FBI and MI5's favorite pick for Vlad's expert on human cloning for his…project."

Tucker's scorn wasn't reserved for Danielle, rather for the fact that dozens of less viable clones died before her that didn't have to. The governments of the world were aware of that, though, not it seems, of the project that created Danielle.

"'Attempts?'" She said, an offended tone on her voice. "Oh, no I succeeded. Succeeded beyond my wildest dreams." She looked past Danny, and he knew, with a sinking feeling in his gut, who she was staring at.

"No," Danielle said from behind him, shock, and revulsion on her voice."

"No," Paulina Ortega heard Danielle say next to her. She said nothing, didn't move, she was too mired in her own shock. _Danielle, _she thought to herself,_ is a clone?_ _Of who? _Then she looked, really _looked _between her and Danny, and the realization punched her in the gut. _She's a clone of _him, she thought. _How is that possible?_

Her thoughts were interrupted by the rush of air as Danielle Fenton ran up to the woman in front of her. In the space of thirty seconds, she'd driven her fist into Zelenkova's gut, even as she drew her pistol. She grabbed her hair and yanked her neck back. "You did it, didn't you? Created all those clones that kept dying before my eyes, and Danny's."

To Paulina's surprise, horror and revulsion flashed in Zelenkova's eyes. "God, no," she said. "That was all Vladimir. I was bought on for the job for one purpose only: creating you."

"Liar," she said darkly. "You created them haphazardly didn't you? All those boys?"

"Danielle!" Danny's voice said sharply, growling out every word, ice blue eyes glittering with rage now. "Put your gun away, let go of her, and step back."

"ShAccount+e's responsible for how all those boys, how they died, melting into green sludge and being conscious for every last goddamn _second_ of it. How _ I _almost died!"

"No," Zelenkova spat out between gasps. "Not them, never them. I tried to save them, but I couldn't. I tried to save _you_, but _I couldn't._"

Danielle growled. "Why the hell should I believe you?"

"Let her explain herself and then we'll see," Danny said, softly though his tone was cold as ice.

She watched as Danielle, the murderous look in her eye slowly started to fade back into a simple death glare as she slowly slid the gun back into it's holster. She stepped back over to stand in the group.

Before anyone could stop her, she found herself asking, "How can she be a clone of Danny? I thought clones were genetic duplicates."

"Oh, you're right about that," Zelenkova said nodding. "She can't be a clone. And the opposite-sex-clone idea in the popular conscious since Heinlein, ignores the fact that such a clone wouldn't be a true clone, more like a somewhat more closely related sister than normal, and not a 'what-if' version of Danny had she been born female. But that's not what you are. Oh, Masters… contacted me and expected me to just sign off on his idea of simply doubling one of Mister Fenton's X chromosomes, but what he originally wanted was basically impossible due to genomic imprinting.n

"I have an inkling of what you're talking about," she heard Danny say, a trace of incredulity and confusion on his voice, "but refresh my memory."

Zelenkova nodded. "Basically, genomic imprinting is the fact that genes express themselves differently depending on whether or not they come from a man or a woman. Alleles are imprinted in such a way that the genes are expressed only by the non-imprinted genes coming from the mother or the father. Back in the 1980s, it was determined that normal development requires the contribution of both maternal and paternal chromosomes. Experiments on mice determined that virtually all mice that have two paternal or maternal genomes die at or before the blastocyst stage, and those that survived to reach that stage, the ones with two maternal genomes developed better. Somewhat."

"She couldn't have two copies of Danny's X chromosome and survive," Paulina found herself saying.

Just like that everyone around her flinched as though struck and began looking away from her pointedly.

"What?" She said, looking around at the people around her.

"She is not a true clone, not a clone at all as a matter of fact. To create her, I used sperm from Danny, and an egg from you, Miss Ortega."


End file.
